Prosody is the science of suprasegmental sound units

Even in the times of ancient grammar people tried to find explanations for different linguistic phenomena. Thus the doctrine of accent - prosody arose. This phenomenon serves to explain the impact and length of syllables. In addition, it has a rather ambiguous interpretation.

Term

Prosody is now viewed from several sides, so it does not have a clear definition. For example, in the phonetics of prosody, this is the science of the various suprasegmental units of sound. Here we mean intonation, tone, stress, etc.

In versification, the same term has a broader notion. It is aimed at studying metrically significant elements of speech. This includes all varieties of syllables, pauses. Perhaps synonymous with rhythm.

Other options

Among other things, by prosody often mean a speech melody, different speech characteristics: timbral and temporal, rhythm, verbal tones. Pointing to the concept of "prosody of speech," they usually mean intonation, although these two terms are also distinguishable among themselves.

With certainty, several concepts can be singled out: the prosody of the syllable, the words and the speeches themselves (intonation).

Syllable

Speaking of the syllable, it is worth noting that in this case prosody is the tone. In the world there are a huge number of languages that use syllabic tones as a distinctive feature. Because of this, one can point to semantic oppositions.

In total, two tones can be distinguished: level and contour. The first option usually refers to the tones of different levels: high, low, medium, intermediate. Usually this prosody is characterized by African languages and the speech of American Indians. The contour system includes sliding tones. In this case, an upward, downward tone, and also a combination thereof is implied. This option is usually endowed with speeches in East Asia.

Word

Speaking of a word, prosody is an accent. Here it is meant that often syllables, uniting in a word, create an integral structure. Thus, they have a special rhythmic organization. Each word has an accent, that is, a selected syllable. The rest have unstressed color in relation to the selected. So you can select the sound stream and mark the rhythm quanta. Among other things, there is another way of highlighting the phonetics of the word. It's about timbre prosody.

Although still if we are talking about the prosody of the word, then you need, first of all, to talk about stress. In this case prosody has certain functions. For example, the climax. She is responsible for emphasizing in the word "center". Significative is characterized by freedom and, at the same time, limited. So, this function is able to allocate not only the grammatical form, but also pay attention to the lexemes and the lexical-semantic version of the word. The delimitic function of verbal prosody indicates an accent that marks the boundary of the word and is fixed.

Prosodika

Some identify the terms "prosodica" and "prosody." This opinion is erroneous, since the concepts refer to different areas. "Prosodik" was introduced in the 70s of the last century. It was then that there was an interest in the study of the text, its analysis. The term was introduced for differentiation. The term "prosodic" is used in the case of a syllable, but "prosody" is a broad concept and refers to all segment units. That is, can be used not only with the syllable, but also with the phrase, word, paragraph and text.

Difference

It is also worth noting the terms "intonation" and "prosody." Many consider them synonymous, although there is still a cardinal opinion. Both terms are multicomponent. Both include the melody, and stress, tone, rhythm, pause, timbre and so on.

On the other hand, prosody is only a phenomenon that distinguishes syllables and determines their combination in the phonetics of the word. But intonation can influence the semantic content, the modality, the communicative meaning. Also distinguishes the syntactic features of speech.

Functions

One way or another, it is possible to distinguish the functions of prosody, regardless of the area to which this term belongs. So, a communicative function is singled out, which makes it possible to form a special utterance having communicative features. Emotional-modal function is now becoming less popular. In addition, recent studies suggest that the relationship between the emotional component and prosody is completely absent.

The personality-social function is now little understood. Nevertheless, it is the identifier of the person who speaks. It can indicate its social status, cultural development, etc.

The structuring function relates more to writing. It is directly related to the formation of the structure of the text. Another function that relates to written speech, or rather, directly to the text, is the rhythm-forming and style-forming. Both are responsible for analyzing the text, require parsing it, establishing boundaries between parts of speech, units of text, etc.