Prosodic Detail in Neapolitan Italian

Download or read book Prosodic Detail in Neapolitan Italian written by Francesco Cangemi and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2014-09-17 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody.