This book illustrates an approach to prosodic typology through the intonational phonology of thirteen typologically different languages and the transcription system of prosody known as Tones and Break Indices (ToBI). This is the first book introducing the history and principles of this system, and it covers European languages, Asian languages, an Australian aboriginal language, and an American Indian language.

The authors bridge the gap between the semantic and syntactic properties of verb tense and aspect, and suggest a unified account of tense and aspect using Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Framework. They compare tense and aspect systems in Romance languages with Germanic ones.

I have been learning languages for over 40 years and during that time I have developed very specific methods for successful language learning. In my book you will find the story of how I came to speak 9 languages and how I have gradually developed my own system for language learning. Along the way you will see how speaking many languages has brought me personal success and enjoyment.

Almost all languages have some grammatical means for the linguistic categorization of nouns. Well-known systems such as the lexical numeral classifiers of South-East Asia, on the one hand, and the highly grammaticalized gender agreement classes of Indo-European languages, on the other, are the extremes of a contiuum. They can have a similar semantic basis, and one can develop from the other. Classifiers come in different morphological forms; they can be free nouns, clitics, or affixes.