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Human self-domestication refers to a new evolutionary hypothesis about human origins. According to this view, humans have experienced changes that are similar to those observed in domesticated mammals and that have provided us with many of the behavioural, and perhaps cognitive pre-requisites for supporting our complex social practices and advanced culture. At the core of this hypothesis is the claim that self-domestication is triggered by (and entails) a reduction in reactive aggression responses. The human self-domestication hypothesis has been recently used to explain how grammars became more sophisticated via a cultural mechanism. Nonetheless, less research has been done in the domain of phonology, even though animal evidence suggests that domestication favours call complex)ity too. In this paper, we hypothesise about the effects of our increased self-domestication on human prosody. We argue for a progressive complexification of prosody that parallels (and might be involved in a positive feed-back loop with) the complexification of grammar in response to a reduction in reactive aggression. We build on evidence of diverse nature, from language typology to brain function to language acquisition studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to classify Romanian dialects from a prosodic point of view within the European Romance-speaking area. The data is part of the Multimedia Atlas of Romance Prosody - AMPER (Contini, 1992) and is analysed dialectometrically by means of ProDis (Elvira-García et al., 2015; Fernández Planas, 2016). The database includes more than 17,000 utterances produced by 48 speakers from 26 survey sites of 15 varieties of 6 Romance languages (Catalan, Spanish, Italian, Sardinian, Friulian and Romanian). The results show that the two main prosodic areas of Romanian (see Roseano, 2016b) remain separate when they are dialectometrized with data from other Romance languages. In addition, if one analyses questions and statements separately, it can be seen that questions allow us to distinguish geoprosodic areas more effectively than statements do (as suggested by previous studies such as Fernández Planas et al., 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In constructionist approaches, constructions are defined as pairings of phonological, morphological and syntactic form, and semantic, pragmatic or discursive meaning. However, in practice very few constructional analyses deal specifically with the intonational properties of constructions. Moreover, constructional approaches are not clear about the ontological status of intonation in a constructional model of language. Combining insights from Construction Grammar and Intonational Studies, specifically the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription model, this paper discusses the role of prosody in a construction-based approach to language, through the analysis of the insubordinate conditional construction (ICC) in Spanish. Building on the analysis of the prosody of 90 tokens of the ICC uttered by 14 native speakers of Peninsular Spanish, we argue that the best way to account for the relationship between intonational patterns and (lexicogrammatical) constructions is to treat intonational patterns as constructions that pair a phonological form with a semantic-pragmatic meaning, which are then inherited by sentence-level constructions as long as their meanings are compatible. • AM intonational models are compatible with constructional approaches. • Prosodic constructions are pairings of a contour (form) and meaning. • Prosodic constructions can have allostructions and dialectal variation. • Sentence-level constructions inherit their prosody. • They inherit it from an abstract prosodic construction with congruent function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with basic intonational features of Sicilian, a Romance variety spoken in Sicily in Southern Italy. While there has been some research on the intonational features of the regional variety of Italian, Sicilian intonation remains undescribed. The first part of the article provides a historic overview of the dialectal configuration of Sicilian and the Sicilian-Italian diglossia. In the subsequent section we perform an intonational analysis on a Sicilian corpus containing acoustic data of 432 utterances (216 broad focus statements and 216 information-seeking yes-no questions). Once the basic intonational features of Sicilian are described and analyzed we use the informatic tool ProDis (Elvira-García et al. 2018) for a quantitative cluster analysis in order to define geoprosodic groups within Siciliy. Finally, we carry out another cluster analysis with the aim of modelling prosodic distances between Romance varieties spoken in different areas in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spoken Spanish in Leon and Palencia, in the northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula, bears traces of the historical development at various different linguistic levels. The main aim of this study is to describe the prosody of open questions in the speech of each of the two cities and compare these prosodic patterns with those of other points in the Peninsula and islands (the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands), and those of the Asturian accent of Oviedo. The research falls within the general framework of the projects undertaken for the AMPER (Contini 1992) and the methodology employed in so called dialectometry (Goebl 1981) based on the tool ProDis (Elvira-García/Balocco/Roseano/Fernández Planas 2018; Fernández Planas 2016 a, 2016 b; Fernández Planas/Roseano/Elvira-García/Balocco 2017a). The work is being carried out with data from 20 informants from 12 survey points, with a large corpus of more than 4000 open questions. The results show that the two above-mentioned survey points have different intonation melodies. We would like to see this work as a contribution to the study of diachronic prosody using instrumentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains the results of a set of perception tests that aimed at measuring perceived prosodic distances between different Romance languages (Italian, Friulian, Sardinian, Catalan, and Spanish). Data were collected within the framework of the AMPER project. The results were obtained by means of discrimination and identification tasks where the judges were 31 native speakers of Catalan form Barcelona and the stimuli were broad focus statements and yes-no questions in the above-mentioned languages. The perceived distances are then compared with the results of a dialectometric analysis of acoustic data. This comparison shows that the perceived distances are related to acoustic differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new tool that performs dialectometric analysis using prosodic acoustic data. This method differs from previous approaches of prosodic dialectometry in the following aspects: 1) the approach does not need a previous intonational transcription, 2) it considers all prosodic parameters (intonation, duration and intensity), 3) it offers a complete set of transparent statistical tests, 4) it is user-friendly, and fully automatic and the computation does not require a concatenation of scripts and applications. The paper also presents the results obtained using the prosody of several Romance varieties. The correlation among the computed acoustic distances with the distances perceived by human listeners (r = 0.6139, p  < .0001) shows the reliability of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insubordination studies often refer to some prosodic features of insubordinated constructions but, to date, no systematic research has been carried out on the effects of insubordination on prosody. This paper analyzes the prosody of both independent and semi-dependent clauses, with subordination marks, using a corpus of 1,230 utterances. The data show that while subordinate and elliptical clauses that can recover the elided clause show prosodic markings of continuation (rising boundary tones), insubordinated clauses do not. In a word, the level of dependence of a grammatical construction with subordination marks is reflected in its prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]