Declination: construct or intrinsic feature of speech pitch?

Declination is taken as the focus of studying pitch phenomena from an acoustic, physiological and perceptual point of view. It is shown that originally declination was no more than a theoretical construct to account for the interpretation of acoustic F0 recordings. Recently, psycholinguistic considerations have enhanced the domain of application so as to account for this phenomenon. The literature is reviewed and the authors take issue over the various claims put forward by others, such as the dominance of the topline over the baseline approach, and the amount of pre-programming involved in declination, as manifested in its slope and in linguistically determined resetting.