Methodological and practical issues in studying intonation. The case of requests in Italian and Spanish task-oriented dialogues

This book is about the way in which intonation conveys the communicative function of requesting in two Romance languages, Italian and Spanish, by analysing semi-spontaneous speech dialogues. It aims at providing a phonetic description of the choices of speakers that make up the intonation systems of requests. In the varied range of methodological paradigms available for intonation description and modelling, this research follows a phonetic approach and confronts methodological issues and concrete problems when conducting research on intonation by adopting a phonetic perspective. The main research question that we want to answer aims to assess if and how phonetic parameters contribute to the distinctions between the different kinds of requests. This book provides an empirical understanding of methodological issues related to a phonetic approach towards analysing intonation, as well as provides a contribution by describing the intonation of requests in Italian and Spanish. In both languages, each request shows a specific intonational realization, but some kinds of requests present a more stable realization than others, independently of dialogue, speakers, semantic or syntactic factors.