The Melody and Rhythm of Speech - (Lund University Press) by Gösta Bruce (Hardcover)

About the Book

An indispensable book presenting for the first time in English an unparalleled overview of the phonetics and phonology of speech melody and rhythm by one of the foremost prosody experts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Book Synopsis

The melody and rhythm of speech: General and Swedish prosody is the only book of its kind on the market. It deals with features of speech that together with consonants and vowels contribute to create meaning in utterances and contribute to give speech its maximal strength as means of human communication. The book deals with prosody at all levels, from the word to text and dialogue and presents models for rhythmic and tonal prominence using an Autosegmental Metrical theoretical approach. On the practical side, the book also describes methods for carrying out prosodic analysis and for transcribing prosody. Aspects of applied prosody are also taken up, including dysprosody, language acquisition, and speech technology. The book gives a coherent and pedagogical presentation of speech prosody by Gösta Bruce, one of the most outstanding international experts on prosody of our time.

From the Back Cover

The melody and rhythm of speech: General and Swedish prosody presents for the first time in English a comprehensive overview of the seminal approach to speech rhythm and melody developed by the world-renown prosodist, Gösta Bruce. It examines prosodic phenomena (stress, tone, intonation) both from a phonetic and phonological point of view and at different levels of prosodic structure, from the word to text and dialogue with a focus on prosody's different communicative functions. It also includes a timely and valuable discussion of issues related to the methods of prosodic analysis as well as to the transcription of prosody.

Using an Autosegmental Metrical theoretical approach, the book provides an unparalled presentation of not only what is more general for the phonology and phonetics of speech prosody but also what is specific for Swedish. The models for speech rhythm and accenting presented in the book are further applied in an elegant fashion to discussions of dialectal variation, as well as to prosody acquisition, dysprosody, speech synthesis, and speech recognition.

The melody and rhythm of speech is an indispensable textbook for disciplines dealing with speech prosody, including linguistics, phonetics, speech therapy, language education, speech technology, language education, and cognitive science.

About the Author

Gösta Bruce (1947-2010) was Professor of Phonetics at Lund University, Sweden

Translator: Merle Horne, Professor Emerita of Linguistics, Lund University, Sweden