Iberia

Abstract

This chapter describes the main features of the prosodic systems of Basque, Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish within the autosegmental-metrical (AM) model. In its word prosody, Basque comprises pitch-accent and stress systems, while the other languages differ in the distribution of final and antepenultimate lexical stress. A discussion of prosodic phrasing and phrasal prominence patterns reveals that accentual phrases play a crucial role in Basque, but not in Catalan, Spanish, or Portuguese, which differ in their higher prosodic structure. Melodic patterns vary in the complexity and distribution of pitch events as well as in their ability to express sentence modality and focus in collaboration with lexical and syntactic markers. The division of labour between prosodic and morphosyntactic encodings varies greatly, with Basque displaying a heavier syntactic load and the other languages having a more varied melodic functionality. Some unresolved research issues are highlighted.