The book covers intonation and prosodic structure from a phonological perspective. The model used is a compositional version of the tone-sequence model of intonation: melodies arise from the individual tones and the way they combine. It shows how morpho-syntactic constituents are mapped to prosodic constituents. Tones and melodies are ‘meaningful’, in the sense that they add a pragmatic component to what is being said. Typologies of intonation patterns at the word level and at the sentence level are each the theme of a chapter. Despite superficial similarity, languages differ in how their tonal patterns arise from tone concatenation. Lexical tones, stress, phrase tones, and boundary tones are assigned differently in different languages; the result is broad variation in intonational grammar. Phonetics and experimental studies of the processing of prosody are also each given their own chapter.

Keywords (5-10): Intonation, prosodic structure, tone-sequence model of intonation, intonation typology, processing of prosody, syntax-prosody interface, semantics-prosody interface