suprasegmentals

Suprasegmentals are the aspects of speech that operate above the level of individual segments—phones or phonemes—to organize longer stretches of language such as syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. They regulate rhythm, timing, pitch, loudness, and emphasis, shaping how utterances are produced and interpreted.

Common suprasegmental features include stress (the relative prominence of syllables, which can be lexical or contrastive), intonation (pitch movement across a sequence of sounds that signals questions, statements, focus, or attitude), tone (systematic pitch patterns that distinguish meanings in tonal languages), duration (the length of vowels and consonants, which can be phonemic in some languages), and juncture (boundary phenomena that affect how sounds connect at word and phrase boundaries). Rhythm and tempo describe the overall timing patterns of a language, ranging from syllable-timed to stress-timed or mora-timed systems.

Languages vary in their reliance on different suprasegmentals. For example, English relies heavily on stress and intonation to convey new information and sentence modality, while Mandarin uses lexical tone to distinguish lexical meaning. In many languages, emotion, emphasis, and discourse structure are conveyed through prosodic choices rather than changes in segmental phonemes.

Analytical approaches include phonological theories of prosody and transcription schemes such as ToBI (Tone and Break Indices) that annotate pitch accents, boundary tones, and breaks. Studying suprasegmentals informs fields from language acquisition and speech synthesis to forensic linguistics.