prosodía

Prosodía, also known as prosody, is the study of the suprasegmental aspects of language—the patterns of rhythm, stress, intonation, tempo, and loudness that extend beyond individual phonemes. It applies to spoken language and, in a broader sense, to the prosodic organization of poetry and song.

In linguistics, prosody encompasses features such as pitch (intonation and tone), duration (length), and intensity (loudness), as well as voice quality. These features interact with syntax and semantics to signal information structure (for example, focus, given/new information, and boundary organization), emotion, attitude, and pragmatic meaning.

Prosodic systems vary across languages: some are tone languages with lexical pitch contrast, while others use intonation to convey sentence modality or emphasis in languages with relatively fixed lexical tones. In research, prosody is analyzed with theoretical models such as the autosegmental-metrical framework and intonational phonology, and annotated using schemes like ToBI. Acoustic measurement often uses spectrographic analysis and tools such as Praat.

In poetry, prosody covers meter, rhythm, versification, stress patterns, and the alignment of meter with syllable counts, which shapes interpretation and performance. Applications include speech synthesis and recognition, language teaching, forensic linguistics, and clinical linguistics by diagnosing prosodic disorders.

The term derives from Greek roots relating to musical accompaniment of spoken verse. Overall, prosody provides essential cues to meaning, structure, and affect in communication, complementing the segmental phonology of speech.