Strategies for Intonation Labelling across Varieties of Italian

Abstract 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.