The purpose of this introduction is to give an outline of the results of acoustic analyses of Danish intonation, as reported in twelve papers, published between 1982 and 1989. The introduction and the papers together constitute a thesis, presented to the Faculty of Arts, University of Copenhagen, for defence for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The first four papers deal with the tonal aspects of stress. The next five treat sentence intonation in long utterances and in short texts. The subject of the following three is intonation in various regional Danish standard languages. Note that the sections are not necessarily mere summaries: Interspersed in the reviews of some of the papers are comments and discussions provoked by the retrospective view the author has acquired on some of the results, especially in the earlier publications.