The Original ToBi System and the Evolution of the ToBi Framework

Abstract This chapter presents an overview of the original ToBI system. It reviews the design of the original ToBI system and its foundations in basic and applied research. It describes the inter-disciplinary community of users and uses for which the system was intended, and it outlines how the consensus model of American English intonation and inter-word juncture was achieved by finding points of useful intersection among the research interests and knowledge embodied in this community. It thus identifies the practical principles for designing prosodic annotation conventions that emerged in the course of developing, testing, and using this particular system. The chapter also describes how the original ToBI…