This is the first comprehensive study of the intonation of different languages of the world, written by a team of leading scholars in the field, most of whom are native speakers of the language in question. Surveying twenty languages, the volume introduces a new system for the multilingual transcription of intonation patterns. The chapters are organized following the same general outline to highlight the differences among languages. The emphasis is on description and comparison, rather than on theory, making this an invaluable sourcebook for researchers in the field.

The contributions to this volume focus on the interrelation between prosody and iconicity and shed new light on the topic by enlarging the number of parameters traditionally considered, and by confronting various theoretical backgrounds. The parameters taken into account include socio-linguistic criteria (age, sex, socio-economic category, region); different kinds of speech situation; affect (attitudes and emotions); gestures; morpho-syntactic constraints. The analysis is pursued in theoretical frameworks such as Information Structure theory, Grice's theory, Relevance theory, experiential...