Intonation in Romance: Systemic similarities and differences

This chapter examines the main similarities and differences in the prosodic and intonation systems of the nine Romance languages and their varieties described in the previous chapters. The first section is devoted to patterns of prominence and phrasing, providing a survey of word and phrase-level prominence features and prosodic domains that are intonationally relevant for each language. The second section discusses the nuclear contours of main utterance types, as well as the use of lexical and syntactic markers to convey pragmatic meanings, and their interaction with intonation. The third section offers a systematic comparison of the nine intonation systems, focusing on the types, complexity, and distribution of pitch events, and the types of nuclear configurations obtained. The final section offers an overview of the common prosodic features and of the main dimensions of variation found across Romance languages, together with a reflection on their contribution to prosodic typology.