ABSTRACT
Intonation describes the way the fundamental frequency of the voice, also called its pitch or F°, changes over the course of an utterance. A slightly broader term is Prosody, which covers not just intonation but also additional aspects of phonetic realization such as pauses, lengthening of segments, perhaps loudness, and spectral tilt; intonation in particular, and perhaps prosody in general, roughly corresponds to the colloquial term ‘inflection’. Certain aspects of prosody (and intonation) are grammatical in nature and as such represented in a phonological representation, called Prosodic Structure. At a minimum, prosodic structure will encode prosodic constituent structure, relative metrical strength or stress of syllables, and location and nature of certain tonal (or ‘intonational’) events (see Ladd, 1996).
