prosoodi

Prosoodi is the study of the suprasegmental aspects of spoken language, focusing on how pitch, loudness, tempo, rhythm, stress, and boundary cues contribute to meaning, structure, and emotion beyond the individual phonemes. The field is commonly known in English as prosody; in some languages the term prosoodi is used as a direct transliteration or cognate. Prosodic features help signal sentence type, focus, information structure, sarcasm, irony, and speaker attitude, and they interact with phonology and semantics.

Components of prosoodi include intonation (pitch patterns), stress (emphasis patterns), and rhythm and timing (syllable duration, tempo). Cross-linguistic variation is a key focus: tone languages rely on pitch to distinguish word meaning, whereas non-tonal languages use pitch primarily for intonational purposes. Prosodic hierarchies are studied within theoretical frameworks such as autosegmental-metrical theory, and via annotation schemes like ToBI (Tone and Break Indices).

Applications of prosoodi span several fields. In speech technology, prosody informs speech synthesis and recognition to produce natural-sounding and comprehensible output. In language teaching, prosodic cues aid pronunciation and listening comprehension. Clinical linguistics and forensic phonetics use prosodic analysis to study and compare speech patterns. Research methods commonly involve acoustic measurement of pitch, duration, and intensity, along with spectrographic analysis and perceptual experiments. In literature, prosody also relates to the rhythmic structure of poetry, though that domain overlaps with rhetorical theory and is often treated as a separate field.