Prosody

Prosody is the set of features in spoken language that extend beyond individual sounds to convey structure, meaning, and speaker attitude. It encompasses rhythm, stress patterns, and intonation, and is realized through acoustic cues such as pitch (fundamental frequency), loudness, tempo, and duration. These suprasegmental elements operate over sequences of syllables or words and interact with the segmental phonology of a language.

Prosody serves multiple functions in communication. It helps signal information structure, such as which words are focused or given in discourse, and it marks sentence type, including questions and statements. It also indicates boundaries, grouping, rhythm, and pacing, and conveys emotion or attitude. In some languages, prosody contributes to lexical or grammatical distinctions as well. Cross-linguistic variation yields different systems of pitch movement and rhythm, including tone languages where pitch can distinguish lexical meaning.

In linguistic research, prosody is studied within phonetics and phonology, using transcription schemes such as ToBI to annotate intonation, stress, and phrasing. Acoustic correlates include fundamental frequency, amplitude, duration, and spectral tilt. Studies rely on speech corpora and experimental methods to model how prosody interacts with syntactic structure and semantic interpretation.

Applications of prosody span language teaching, speech technology, and clinical linguistics. It informs speech synthesis and recognition, pronunciation training, and therapy. In literary contexts, prosody also refers to the rhythmic and metrical patterns in poetry, shaping performance and interpretation.