The definition of a descriptive space of Italian prosodic forms: The CALLIOPE model

CALLIOPE (Combined and Assessed List of Latent Influences On Prosodic Expressivity) is a model that aims at categorizing all prosodic forms. Following Cresti (2000), we will call sentences as Information Units (UI). Each UI has a surjective correspondence with a specific prosodic unit, and conveys a specific informative intention. With our model, we aim at providing a list of all possible factors that affect the prosody, and consequently the interpretation, of every UI. The CALLIOPE model defines a multidimensional “space”, where each “dimension” represents a characteristic influencing the vocal paralinguistic components of UIs. Each characteristic is actually a categorical variable, assuming values in a set of labels; for example, the dimension Emotion contains the labels sadness, joy, fear, etc.