Intonation and Prosody Prosody is a term

Intonation and Prosody • Prosody is a term used in suprasegmen • tal phonetics and phonology to refer collectively to variations in pitch, loud • ness, tempo and rhythm (D. Crystal 1980). Recently voice quality has been added to the list of prosodic features (Roach 2001).

Intonation and Prosody • Intonation is a complex unity of four com • ponents, formed by communicatively rele • Vant variations in: 1)voice pitch, or speech melody; 2)the prominence of words, or their accent; 3)the tempo (rate), rhythm and pausation of the utterance, and 4)voice-tamber, this complex unity serving to express adequately the speaker’s thoughts, volition, emotions, feelings and attitudes towards reality (Vassilyev 1970).

Intonation and Prosody • Acoustically, intonation is a complex com • bination of varying fundamental frequency, intensity (a correlate of loudness), duration (Time) - the length of any segment or phrase, and spectral characteristics (F 1, F 2, F 3) which correlate with voice quality.

Intonation and Prosody • At the perceptual level these are the auditory impressions of pitch, loudness, length and voice quality. • The linguistic level is concerned with decoding the meanings which are expressed by phrasing, accentuation and tone usage, and it is at this level that the term intonation is most commonly used.

Prosody and Intonation • Each prosodic feature is a system in itself which possesses certain units, relative in character. For example, there is a system of simple (fall, rise, level), complex (fallrise, rise-fall) and compound (fall + rise) tones in English; pitch range categories are: normal, wide and narrow; accent may be primary or secondary, pauses are short, long, and extra-long; tempo can be

Intonation and Prosody • normal, fast and slow; voice quality features are modal, creaky, breathy, husky etc. ; rhythm may be described as clipped or slurred, constant or variable etc.