Prosodies : with special reference to Iberian languages

Prosodies, in the broad Firthian sense, covers phenomena that extend over stretches of segmental and featural units that must be examined with respect to their interaction with other features to fully appreciate their role in the phonetics and phonology of a given language. The papers deal with a wide range of subjects, from intonational prominenceand prosodic phrasing to theacoustic properties of segments and features. Prosodies significantly broadens our knowledge of languages and dialect varieties that as yet have not been carefully investigated such as Cairene and Lebanese Arabic, Catalan including Central Catalan and the insular dialects of Majorcan, Minorcan and Alguer Catalan, Galician, Italian, various dialects of Portuguese (Standard European, Northern European, and Brazilian Portuguese), and different varieties of Argentine Spanish as well as Peninsular Spanish. However, well-known West Germanic languages, English, Dutch and German, have not been neglected. Many of the contributions are the first account of the phenomena addressed in the language(s) under consideration thus bringing new data to light. Moreover, most papers take a cross-linguistic or cross-dialectal view favouring a better understanding of language similarities and differences, as well as of language variation and change. This approach is crucial in the case of neighbouring languages/varieties and is an important contribution to the development of language typologies. And as is characteristic of the series, theresearch presented in Prosodies cover laboratory approaches as well as theoretical investigations.