The first edition of this book was intended partly as a monograph and partly as a readable introduction to an influential body of work on the phonology of intonation. Monographs, by their very nature, don't normally merit a second edition, but readable introductions need to be updated in order to stay useful. Prolonging the useful life of the original work in its function as readable introduction has been the principal goal of producing this revision. However, I have not resisted the temptation to tinker with the exposition in ways that I hope will make some of the monograph's original points clearer than they were the first time round. I have also rearranged the basic structure of the book somewhat, so that the distinction between pitch on the one hand and prominence and phrasing on the other emerges more clearly.

The main thing I have done to the text, in addition to correcting minor errors and updating references, is to revise and expand sections on areas of research that have been especially productive since the mid 1990s. This includes the development of the ToBI family of intonational transcription systems; research on the alignment of pitch features with the segmental string; and theoretical and experimental work on the intonational expression of focus and information structure. As in the first edition, I have included a certain amount of background material that some will find superfluous, and provided brief definitions for terms (such as ‘citation form’ or ‘spectral tilt’) that may be unfamiliar to a significant number of potential readers.