Phonetic Explanations for Cross-Linguistic Prosodic Similarities

A relatively wide range of cross-language similarities in prosodic patterns, i.e. not only in the final fall of statements and the like, but also the treatment of compound words, the marking of phonetic integrity of underlying semantic blocks and their hierarchy may be explained if the typical prosodic configurations are hypothesised to arise from a common archetypal, biologically related (rise-fall) contour, and from a few derived contrastive...