Prosody: Information Structure, Grammar, Interaction

This special issue of Linguistik Online collects four articles by researchers whose contribution to prosody research has been seminal. The main aims of the issue are to introduce the reader to some leading approaches to prosody and to increase discussion between scholars working within different frameworks. The main focus of the contributing authors’ work has been prosodic aspects of Italian and German, and their articles make particular reference to these languages. However, neither research in English, nor English as an object language, can or should be ignored when working on prosody, as substantial theories on it – and especially on intonation – were first developed for British English and American English. We believe that the four articles all address crucial issues, including the role of prosody in linguistic description and its place in a general theory of language: a brief overview of current trends in research on prosody, and an explanation of how the four contributions relate to these trends, follows below.