Strategies for Intonation Labelling across Varieties of Italian

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 phrasefinal pitch contours.