Prosodija

Prosodija, or prosody, is the branch of linguistics that studies the suprasegmental aspects of speech: rhythm, stress, intonation, tempo, and loudness. It examines how patterns that extend over syllables and words convey meaning, structure, emphasis, and attitude, as well as how they interact with syntax and discourse.

Core features of prosodija include pitch (the fundamental frequency), duration, and intensity, which together shape features such as stress placement, rhythmic patterns, and intonation contours. Stress can be lexical or contrastive, while intonation marks sentence modality (statement, question) and focus. Rhythm types, such as stress-timed and syllable-timed languages, describe broad timing tendencies across languages. Prosody also uses pauses and tempo to structure discourse and signal boundaries between phrases or units of information.

Prosodija encompasses both phonological representations, such as abstract tones and boundary markers, and their phonetic realization in speech, expressed through measurable acoustic properties. Researchers use transcription schemes like ToBI (Tone and Break Indices) and other annotation frameworks to describe and compare prosodic patterns across languages.

Languages differ in how they deploy prosody: some rely heavily on pitch and tonal patterns for lexical or grammatical distinctions (tone languages), others use prosody mainly to convey pragmatic or emotional information or to mark syntactic structure. Because prosody interacts with sound, meaning, and social context, it is essential in speech synthesis, recognition, language teaching, and forensic linguistics, as well as in the study of poetry and performance that relies on rhythmic and tonal variation.