The book offers an overview of the methodological aspects and issues of intonation, concerning both production and perception. Through the analysis of Pisa Italian, it focuses on the role of intonation in languages where no lexical function is played by tonal events and provides an example of how the findings relating to production may shed light on the findings obtained through perception, and vice versa.

The point discussed in the book is that the variation observed in production and the often fuzzy boundaries between categories found in perception are due to the various types of information that intonation is known to communicate, ranging from linguistic to paralinguistic. Categories in intonation are argued to have different properties from other linguistic units claimed to be categorical, as they show a high within-category variation that is functional to the need to express shades of a meaning together with other information relating to the linguistic structure.