The author first defines the following notions of information structure: focus (vs. background), given (vs. new), and topic (vs. comment). He then goes on to show how these notions are reflected in the prosodic systems of Slavic languages. Focus in all Slavic languages is reflected in prosodic prominence governed by a stress-focus correspondence defined by the author. In general, ‘given’ is realized outside the sentence stress. Focus does not have an obligatory prosodic reflex in Slavic languages.

Slavic languages are notorious for rich inflectional systems, allowing substantial freedom in word order. Aside from SVO word order, canonical for the great majority of Slavic languages, orders with arguments surfacing in non-canonical positions are also allowed. We consider two such orders – OVS and OSV. The two orders stem from two different types of argument reordering with distinct syntactic, interpretive and prosodic properties. The first is linked to neutral prosody and is licenced by the object being construed as interpretively prominent compared to the subject. The object undergoing this type of reordering binds into the subject and takes scope over it. This reordering is possible only if the thematic prominence relations of arguments are identified by means other than their relative structural position. The second type is linked to marked prosody and is licenced by the displaced object being disambiguated as contrastive. In this type of reordering the object cannot bind into the subject or take scope over it. This type of reordering is possible only if the object carries a strong prosodic marker.

The chapter presents and discusses empirical data on the neuropsychology of gesture production. The focus of this chapter is on the specific contributions of the right and left hemispheres to the generation of gestures. Since the respective neuroscientific method has a substantial impact on the study results and different methodologies can even entail apparently opposing results concerning gesture production, different neuropsychological methods, their paradigms, and limitations are presented in detail. Spontaneous gesture production studies evidence a substantial contribution of the right hemisphere to gesture production, while gesture production on command studies show a relevant role of the left hemisphere. Gestures that are generated in association with right hemispheric functions such as spatial cognition, nonverbal emotional expression, global and metaphorical thinking appear to be generated in the right hemisphere, while gestures that are linked to tool use praxis are generated in the left hemisphere. The findings further provide a neuropsychological basis for understanding the complementarity but also the dissociation between gestural and verbal message.

We shed light on the question of how narrow information (F) and contrastive focus (CF) are intonationally and syntactically realized by heritage speakers (HSs) of Peninsular Spanish (PS) who have German as their second L1, and compare their data to those of monolingual speakers (MSs) of PS. Results from a production experiment show clear differences between the groups with respect to preferred syntactic strategies and, consequently, the intonational realization of focal pitch accents. The preferred strategy of HSs is stress shift, followed by p-movement and simple clefts, for both focus types. Conversely, MSs mostly use different strategies for each focus type; that is, pseudo-clefts and p-movement for F, and simple clefts and focus fronting for CF. Interestingly, stress shift is not a relevant option. The attested differences support the view that the interface between discourse on one hand, and syntax and phonology on the other, is challenging for bilingual speakers (Sorace, 2011).

We present an analysis of phrasal prosody, with an emphasis on focus-marking, for heritage speakers of Samoan in Aotearoa New Zealand. The analysis is based on recordings of four speakers doing a picture-description task designed to elicit different focus positions and types, from an earlier study of home country Samoan (Calhoun, 2015). All speakers showed features of phrasal prosody similar to those found for home country Samoan; however, there was considerable variation between speakers. We relate this to the language background of the speakers, and their attitudes and beliefs toward their heritage language. In particular, there were differences between generation 1.5 and 2 speakers, relating to their engagement with and beliefs about their university Samoan language classes. This shows the importance of these factors in the acquisition and maintenance of prosodic features, similar to other more-studied language features.

The relationship between context and prosody is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive ones in language. At the same time, it is one of the most difficult to describe because it is based on acoustic cues that only need milliseconds to create an image in our brain. However, speakers of a language can generally understand their interlocutors’ emotional and cognitive status through their prosodic realization. Prosodic pragmatics is the branch of pragmatics that attempts to identify the intentionality of the speaker’s meaning in a real context based on the analysis of the suprasegmental aspects of speech production. If prosody studies how an utterance is pronounced in unison with the perceptual features of pitch, length, and loudness, then prosodic pragmatics studies the acoustic and cognitive contextual parameters in conversation. The chapter will show the relationship between prosody, information, and context in communication. Starting from the essential acoustic parameters of speech, it will revise the most influential theories of intonation through the prosodic pragmatics lens to understand the cognitive adaptation of a message in a specific context.

The sound of people’s voices when speaking to others is sometimes a clue to their possible ironic intent. This chapter presents an overview of some of the specific vocal strategies employed when people express ironic meaning. Speakers signal their ironic intentions through local and global features of prosody, along with vocal impressions (e.g., spectral information that depicts a different person or imagined agent), laughter, and other nonverbal vocalizations. Experimental studies demonstrated that these vocal strategies are key indices for listeners when they infer that speakers convey irony, including sarcasm, through their talk. Bryant describes the evolutionary roots of these different vocalizations (e.g., the desire for play) and argues how vocal strategies are an important element in how people coordinate and cooperate during verbal interaction. He emphasizes that different vocal strategies are not fixed, but vary in different situations to create a wide range of contextually appropriate pragmatic messages that others may readily interpret.

The essay sketches the development of W.G. Sebald’s poetry from its beginnings in the mid-1960s through the unpublished writings of the 1970s, the 1980s long poem Nach der Natur (After Nature), and the poems written for the volumes For Years Now and Unerzählt (Unrecounted) shortly before his death. The first section introduces Sebald the poet with several general remarks, touching on a poem from the 1960s, passages from Nach der Natur (After Nature) and two poems from the 1990s. This is followed by sections illustrating effects of the non-simultaneous reception of After Nature in German and English and considering the influence of Southern German, Austrian and Swiss prose on the language of Sebald’s poetry. The final section visits the poet’s ‘lyrical workshop’, in other words the development of his poetry in manuscript form between the 1960s and mid-1980s, and the integration of a significant part of the manuscript ‘Across the Land and the Water’ into the final two sections of After Nature. The essay concludes that Sebald wrote poems throughout his life, and that it is likely he would have published further volumes of poetry had he lived longer.

Gilbert White – famed naturalist, clergyman, and sometime-poet – played with the relationship between echoes and poetry in surprising ways in his Natural History of Selborne (1789). White used Latin poetry as an instrument to measure echoes, and he played around with English prosodic ideas about ‘sound echoing’ sense. This chapter’s reading of White’s echo play highlights the ways in which assumptions baked into our category of ‘poetry’ – that it isn’t science, that it is an unlikely instrument for measurements, that it has something to do with expressive subjectivity, that in English it involves feet and substitutions – can obscure what and how people heard in the past. We should be wary of using understandings of lyric forged by Romantic poets and anachronistically instituted as central to all poetry to make sense of how and why someone like White engaged it. We should be wary of assuming even something as basic as how many syllables people of the past heard in particular lines.

This chapter examines the history of the most frequent metres in early Latin comedy, iambic senarii and trochaic septenarii. While persisting into the classical period, these metres become less prominent; early funerary epigrams can still be composed in iambic senarii, but elegiacs predominate, and there are also significant changes in prosody and versification rules. No sharp chronological contrast is observed in the tradition of dramatic iambo-trochaics. The main differences between early and classical iambo-trochaics are not metrical, but prosodic; they consist above all in the elimination or reduction of prosodic variants, such as original length of vowel endings (-āt for -ăt), iambic shortening, sigmatic ecthlipsis; these phenomena are common in Plautus but absent, e.g., from Varro and Phaedrus. Conversely, lengthening with muta cum liquida, which is absent from comedy, is well attested in imperial iambo-trochaics, including e.g. Phaedrus and inscriptions. Even in this respect, however, one should be wary of neat chronological generalisations, especially because the reduction of prosodic variants is already attested in early authors such as Terence.