L'avancement des recherches en géoprosodie et le Projet AMPER

Abstract

Since 2001, the Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l`Espace Roman (AMPER) has glued several research teams from various laboratories, in Europe and America, aiming to give a description and a comparison of the prosodic features of Romance linguistic varieties. Thanks to the participation of a number of researchers (dialectologists, phoneticians, sociolinguists, philologists and so on) and to their decision to share the same experimental paradigm, studies in Romance geoprosody (fostered by Contini, 1992) began to receive important contributions in view of a common target and within a structured framework. The project does not have a deadline for its achievement and is open to contributions from all involved fields. Its dimensions and its popularity, to whom the Laboratori de fonètica de la UB contributed as well, in certain areas of the international academic research, drew the attention of researchers working within different theoretical frameworks. Even though works in progress are highlighting local peculiarities in regional domains, a general review on global variability is still an ambitious aim. We summarise in this paper some preliminary reflections already presented elsewhere, in order to sketch a balance on the state of the art of the project and to discuss new ideas concerning both the classification and the evaluation of available data.