The treatment of the link between sentence stress and focus in the previous chapter sets the stage for this final chapter, in which I explore how the ‘metrical’ and ‘autosegmental’ aspects of intonation fit together. Once we adopt the idea that a culminative metrical structure is central to understanding the relation between sentence stress and focus, we find that the same idea sheds light on other problems in intonational phonology. The goal of this chapter is to show, for several different and superficially unrelated issues, that explicit recognition of metrical structure in intonational phonology helps make sense of several long-standing puzzles, and clears away some conceptual problems that have held back the field for too long.

The structure of intonational tunes

Prenuclear accents in tune–text association

It is widely assumed that a language's intonational phenomena can be classified into contour types or ‘tunes’. Many descriptions of many European languages contain references to ‘neutral declarative’ intonation, ‘interrogative’ intonation, and the like. Some descriptions of English go considerably further than this, positing specific tune types, like the ‘contradiction contour’ (Liberman and Sag 1974) or the ‘surprise–redundancy contour’ (Sag and Liberman 1975). In the same way, the IPO description of Dutch identifies such tunes as the ‘hat pattern’ and the ‘3C’, while Delattre's classification of French tune types (Delattre 1966) includes such tune types as ‘major continuation’, ‘minor continuation’, and ‘implication’.