I don't believe I've spoken about this before but this is one of my passions.
I have recently begun to research prosody in English again, and I 've found a fair amount of OK resources.
First of all, I use Google Scholar mostly, for those who would like to know, as well as publications. I've read Bolinger's works and a book by John Wells in the British school's recent work.
I have not been satisfied by what I've read of ToBI, and there is a lot of work with it in other languages but it's challenging enough for English, the very language it was designed for (though perhaps it suits Dutch better).
My biggest gripe is the use of separate symbols rather than using some sort of diagram or iconic diacritic, but there are reasons. The second biggest is that ToBI's tradition rarely contrasts examples in the literature. It also tends to wave things away as sandhi effects, and pretend that most things dictated by syntax.
This is not a problem with ToBI per se, but moreso the standard of research. If you open up Professor Well's book 'English Intonation' the notion that you are limited by the options available disappears. On the other hand, the British school doesn't mark a distinction between boundary tones a.k.a. spreading tones, and pitch accents, i.e. pitch "excursions" associated with stressed syllables (not to be confused with the phenomena in Japanese and Swedish.) Notably boundary tones may be associated with the left or right side of a pitch accent.
ToBI's other weakness is not distinguishing lexical and sentential stresses and their interaction (remedied to an extent in certain adaptations, which hilariously have ToBI as a phonological level and go further into detail in a "microprosodic" phonetic level; ToBI is in addition somewhat like the generative syntax/transformational grammar tradition in referring to the sandhi rules as a "grammar".) It does have a "break" tier to show how closely together words and phrases are tied together (which is replicated in the afore-mentioned systems as well.) The assumption is that syllable structure, segments, and suprasegmentals don't interact directly, hence autosegmental theory.
The most difficult aspect of intonation is that it can be stereotyped, but it is essentially gradient everywhere. They are "fuzzy" categories in other words with exemplars and marginal cases. (They were compared to vowels in that study but I think vowels may be more cut-and-dried.) This may or may not have to do with the study being about reproducing intonational contours. I think maybe they are like "best practices" for a language, and they accumulate from people speaking and living in a language. Over many generations they are refined, and the language itself is more streamlined and refined so that all parts fit together better and don't leak oil. Much of language is analogous in some sense to fashion.
Going back, Bolinger's prototypical profiles include two which are contrasted by 'rising to' and 'rising from'. Astoundingly, when I discovered the right and left boundary tones, they reminded me of this. I'll have to go back and look but I think that maybe he was referring to L+H* and L*+H, respectively, in RaP (Rhythm and Prosody). My notes from that were unfortunately destroyed (don't write with Frixion pen and then put a warm coffee mug on top) but I feel this is very promising.
IVie is an extension like RaP to ToBI albeit older; it was used in a large-scale research project on the comparative prosody of the dialects of English in Ireland and the United Kingdom.
There are interestingly applications in copular study in cognitive research and in Austinian speech [illocutionary] acts. This is all so very up my alley. It just seems very overwhelming. I already have a very obtuse personal Wikipad dedicated to this, and I can never get it in order. The first order seems to be a better platform for hosting recordings than SoundCloud, because I don't want to stream everything at a time. The other difficulty lies in the production of these intonational profiles; they're not easy. I wonder why, if they're used as they are in conversation. So curious.
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