Such elements are known as suprasegmentals. Prosody may reflect features of the speaker or the utterance: their emotional state; the form of utterance statement, question, or command ; the presence of irony or sarcasm ; emphasis, contrastand focus. It may reflect elements of language not encoded by grammarpunctuation or choice of vocabulary.
In the study of prosodic aspects of speech, it is usual to distinguish between auditory measures subjective impressions produced in the mind of the listener and objective measures physical properties of the sound wave and physiological characteristics of articulation that may be measured objectively.
Auditory subjective and objective acoustic and articulatory measures of prosody do not correspond in a linear way. Different combinations of these variables are exploited in the linguistic functions of intonation and stress, as well as other prosodic features such as rhythm and tempo.
The behavior of the prosodic variables can be studied either as contours across the prosodic unit or by the behavior of boundaries. Prosodic features are suprasegmental, since they are properties of units of speech that are defined over groups of sounds rather than single segments.
Personal characteristics that belong to an individual are not linguistically significant while prosodic features are. It is not clear which aspects of prosody are found in all languages and which are specific to particular languages and dialects. Some writers e.
English intonation is often said to be based on three aspects:. The choice of pitch movement and the highlighting of particular words to create different intonation patterns can be seen in the following English examples:.
The example above is an example of using intonation to highlight particular words and to employ rising and falling of pitch to change meaning. If read out-loud, the pitch of your voice moves in different directions on word "cat.
In the second line, pitch falls indicating a statement or confirmation. Finally, in the third line, a complicated rise-fall pattern indicates incredulity. An additional pitch-related variation is pitch range ; speakers are capable of speaking with a wide range of pitch this is usually associated with excitementwhile at other times with a narrow range.
English makes use of changes in key ; shifting one's intonation into the higher or lower part of one's pitch range Googletrender believed to be meaningful in certain contexts. Stress functions as the means of making a syllable prominent. Stress may be studied in relation to individual words named "word stress" or lexical stress or in relation to larger units of speech traditionally referred to as "sentence stress" but more appropriately named " prosodic stress ".
Stressed syllables are made prominent by several variables. Stress is typically associated with the following:. Some of these cues are more powerful or prominent than others. Cruttenden, for example, writes "Perceptual experiments have clearly shown that, in English at any rate, the three features pitch, length and loudness form a scale of importance in bringing syllables into prominence, pitch being the most efficacious, and loudness the least so".
When pitch prominence is the major factor, the resulting prominence is often called accent rather than stress. There is considerable variation from language to language concerning the role of stress in identifying words or in interpreting grammar and syntax.
Although rhythm is not a prosodic variable in the way that pitch or loudness are, it Googletrender usual to Googletrender a language's characteristic rhythm as a part of its prosodic phonology.