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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 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]

• F0 and duration cues are significant for intonation perception in both languages groups. • Intensity cues only play a limited role in Spanish listeners' intonation perception. • Tonal and non-tonal languages show similar sensitivities to f0 linear changes in intonation. • Spanish listeners used higher f0 contours to perceive questions than Mandarin listeners. • Perceptual weighting varied based on acoustic and word-level suprasegmental contexts. This study investigates cue-weighting differences in intonation perception between tonal and non-tonal languages, specifically focusing on how native Spanish listeners and Mandarin learners of Spanish identify intonation categories using changes in multiple acoustic dimensions. Employing a relatively continuous response scale, we analyzed listener performance in two perceptual tests, in which stimuli were generated by manipulating the suprasegmental cues in sentence-final positions. The results of data analyses indicate that while f0 and duration cues are significant for intonation categorization in both Spanish and Mandarin listeners, intensity appears to be a redundant cue that exerts limited effect only on native Spanish listeners. Contrary to the general claim of a tonal language benefit in pitch perception, our two language groups showed similar sensitivities to f0 linear transitions perceived as sentence intonation. Moreover, Spanish natives used higher f0 contours for question recognition compared to Mandarin learners and relied more heavily on secondary cues in their auditory judgments. The study also demonstrates that perceptual weighting varies across acoustic conditions and stress patterns, suggesting that the dynamic mapping between acoustics and intonation is shaped by language background as well as specific acoustic and word-level suprasegmental contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]