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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]

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]