Prosodic features are suprasegmental, since they are properties of units of speech that are defined over groups of sounds rather than single segments. When talking about prosodic features, it is important to distinguish between the personal characteristics that belong to an individual's voice (for example, their habitual pitch range, intonation patterns, etc.) and the independently variable prosodic features that are used contrastively to communicate meaning (for example, the use of changes in pitch to indicate the difference between statements and questions). Personal characteristics that belong to an individual are not linguistically significant while prosodic features are. Prosody has been found across all languages and is described to be a natural component of language. The defining features of prosody that display the nuanced emotions of an individual differ across languages and cultures.
Intonation Some writers (e.g., O'Connor and Arnold) have described intonation entirely in terms of pitch, while others (e.g., Crystal) propose that "intonation" is a combination of several prosodic variables. English intonation is often said to be based on three aspects: • The division of speech into units • The highlighting of particular words and syllables • The choice of pitch movement (e.g., fall or rise) The choice of pitch movement and the highlighting of particular words to create different intonation patterns can be seen in the following English conversation: : "That's a cat?" : "Yup. That's a cat." : "A
cat? I thought it was a mountain lion!" The exchange 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 the voice moves in different directions on the word "cat." In the first line, pitch goes up, indicating a question. In the second line, pitch falls, indicating a statementa confirmation of the first line in this case. Finally, in the third line, a complicated fall-rise pattern indicates incredulity. Each pitch/intonation pattern communicates a different meaning.
Stress 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: • pitch prominence (a pitch level that is different from that of neighboring syllables, or a pitch movement) • increased length (duration) • increased loudness (dynamics) • differences in timbre: in English and some other languages, stress is associated with aspects of vowel quality (whose acoustic correlate is the formant frequencies or spectrum of the vowel). Unstressed vowels tend to be centralized relative to stressed vowels, which are normally more peripheral in quality Some of these cues are more powerful or prominent than others. Alan 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.
Tempo Rhythm Although rhythm is not a prosodic variable in the way that pitch or loudness are, it is usual to treat a language's characteristic rhythm as a part of its prosodic phonology. It has often been asserted that languages exhibit regularity in the timing of successive units of speech, a regularity referred to as
isochrony, and that every language may be assigned one of three rhythmical types: stress-timed (where the durations of the intervals between stressed syllables is relatively constant), syllable-timed (where the durations of successive syllables are relatively constant) and mora-timed (where the durations of successive
morae are relatively constant). As explained in the
isochrony article, this claim has not been supported by scientific evidence.
Pause Voiced or unvoiced, the pause is a form of interruption to
articulatory continuity such as an open or terminal
juncture.
Conversation analysis commonly notes pause length. Distinguishing
auditory hesitation from silent pauses is one challenge. Contrasting junctures within and without
word chunks can aid in identifying pauses. There are a variety of
"filled" pause types.
Formulaic language pause
fillers include "Like", "Er" and "Um", and
paralinguistic expressive respiratory pauses include the
sigh and
gasp. Although related to breathing, pauses may contain contrastive linguistic content, as in the periods between individual words in
English advertising voice-over copy sometimes placed to denote high information content, e.g. "Quality. Service. Value".
Chunking Pausing or its lack contributes to the perception of word groups, or chunks. Examples include the
phrase,
phraseme,
constituent or
interjection. Chunks commonly highlight
lexical items or
fixed expression idioms. Chunking prosody is present on any complete utterance and may correspond to a
syntactic category, but not necessarily. The well-known English chunk "Know what I mean?" in common usage sounds like a single word ("No-wada-MEEN?") due to blurring or rushing the articulation of adjacent word syllables, thereby changing the potential open junctures between words into closed junctures. ==Functions==