This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the prosody of Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish using the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription system. The chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language as well as on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages. This book will pave the way for more systematic typological comparisons of prosody across both Romance and non-Romance languages.

Based on the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona on September 17-18, 2009, this volume brings together researchers working on issues of the prosodic encoding and expression of sentence-level meaning. The contributions to the book result from a vivid exchange of research ideas and research methodologies on issues related to the relationship between prosody and meaning and from stimulating discussions and collaborative work between researchers coming from different perspectives.

Microwave Chemistry has changed the way to work in chemical laboratories and is an established state-of-the-art technology to accelarate and enhance chemical processes. This book not only gives an overview of the technology, its historical development and theoretical background, but also presents its exceptionally broad spectrum of applications. Microwave Chemistry enables graduate students and scientist to learn and apply its methods successfully.

Funerary Practices in the Second Half of the Second Millennium BC in Continental Atlantic Europe presents a selection of essays dedicated to funerary practices from Belgium to the north of Portugal. It aims at filling gaps in the documentation and helping to better understand the relationships between these Atlantic regions during the Bronze Age. Our knowledge of the Atlantic Bronze Age has increased considerably over the last thirty years, but the current state of research varies from one region to another of Western Atlantic Europe, with a marked dichotomy between north and south. The volume not only highlights the cultural characteristics of those Atlantic regions that are poorly represented in European syntheses on the Bronze Age, but also establishes the long-term relationships, if any, that were maintained between the regions of the Southern Atlantic area and those of the Northern Atlantic area.