Prosody

Done by Zubiya, Zainab and Noor

Intonation  

Intonation is in fact an amalgam of several prosodic variables. English intonation is often 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)
These three aspects are sometimes known as Tonality, Tonicity and Tone (and collectively as "the three T's") 

An additional pitch-related variation is pitch range: speakers are capable of speaking sometimes with a wide range of pitch (this is usually associated with excitement), at other times with a narrow range. English has been said to make use of changes in key: shifting one's intonation into the higher or lower part of one's pitch range is believed to be meaningful in certain contexts.

Tempo

Tempo is a measure of the number of speech units of a given type produced within a given amount of time. A common measure is that of syllables per second. Speech tempo varies from one person to the other according to contextual and emotional factors, between speakers and also between different languages and dialects. 

Pause 

A pause occurs before words that carry more importance. A pause or the lack of a pause can have an affect on the meanings of the words 

Rhythm

•Rhythm is not a part of prosody as pitch and loudness are, but it is important to a languages phonology.

•Rhythm is learnt mainly during the early stages of life.

•English is stress-timed language which means that stressed syllables are said at regular intervals, while unstressed syllables are shortened to fit a rhythm. Syllables most often end with a consonant.

•Words of functional meaning rather than grammatical meaning are stressed more often.

•French, spanish, greek, italian, yoruba and telegu are syllable time languages.   Syllables recur at approximately equal intervals.  Syllables often end with a vowel.

•Rhythmic patterns can be used to signal differences in syntactic structure. 

The 2000-year-old skeletons

The two 1000-year-old skeletons

Emotion

•Emotion can change a person’s prosody unintentionally, like when experiencing stress or fear.

•People usually increase their volume and pitch when angry, and increase their tempo and pitch when excited.

•It can be used intentionally, as when sarcasm is used.

•Tone of voice can contribute subconsciously to a conversation, but it is harder to decode emotion from prosody than it is to decode from facial expressions.

Stress

•Stress is the emphasis given to certain words or syllables in a word and is seen by an increase in volume and sometimes pitch.

•The stress placed on words within a sentence is called “prosodic stress”.

•The position of lexical stress in a word can vary depending on accent or dialect.

•Prosodic stress is used to change a sentence pragmatically and can change or clarify the meaning of a sentence.

“I didn’t take the test yesterday”