This chapter proposes a consensus system for the annotation of Standard German intonation within the framework of autosegmental-metrical phonology: GToBI. First, it provides a survey of existing studies of German intonation, including traditional auditory approaches as well as more recent phonological studies and instrumental analyses. It then gives a detailed exposition of GToBI, showing how the intonation contours considered to be distinctive in the surveyed works can be captured, and compares GToBI to three earlier autosegmental-metrical approaches to German intonation. Finally, it discusses a number of theoretical issues, such as whether pitch accents need to be represented with leading tones or not, how many levels of phrasing are required, and the status and distribution of phrase accents.

Many theories of intonational phonology have granted some special status to pitch features that occur at the edges of prosodic domains, contrasting them with prominence-lending pitch configurations. The standard American structuralist theory that flourished in the 1950s (Trager & Smith 1951) drew a clear distinction between PITCH PHONEMES and JUNCTURE PHONEMES, the former constituting the body of a contour and the latter describing the movements at the contour’s end. Parallel to this development, a distinction was also drawn within the Prague School between the cumulative and delimitative functions of tonal phenomena (Trubetzkoy 1958), the former including prominence, the latter domainedge marking. Bolinger (especially 1970) distinguished ‘accent’ from ‘intonation’: ACCENT referred to the distinctive pitch shapes that accompany prominent stressed syllables (now generally known, following Bolinger, as pitch accents), while INTONATION included, among other things, distinctive pitch movements at the ends of contours. A distinction very similar, but not identical, to Bolinger’s is made in the theory of intonation developed at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in the Netherlands (Cohen & ’t Hart 1967, ’t Hart et al. 1990), namely between PROMINENCE-LENDING and NON-PROMINENCE-LENDING pitch movements.

This chapter examines the intonation of a number of varieties of Italian (those spoken in Naples, Bari, Palermo, and Florence) with the goal of establishing a common framework for annotating the prosodic phenomena that have been studied so far. In particular, it describes the pitch accent inventory for each variety, showing a number of common traits, such as the use of a specific nuclear pitch accent type used to mark contrastive narrow focus as opposed to broad focus in declaratives. It also discusses the evidence for two levels of phrasing and provides a non-positional definition for the nuclear pitch accent, which is marked with a special flag since it can be followed by further pitch accents and phrase accents. Finally, it discusses the issues of downstep and the partial realization, or truncation, of phrase-final pitch contours.