ABSTRACT

Besides carrying valuable information about a speaker’s emotions, prosody is also employed to express several kinds of linguistic distinctions. For example, in the vast majority of languages, yes/no questions are marked by rising intonation at the end of the sentence (Dryer, 2005b). In addition, some lexical contrasts in English and many other languages depend entirely on the placement of stress, as shown by the fact that when the word content receives stress on its first syllable it functions as a noun referring to “stuff,” but when it receives stress on its second syllable it functions as an adjective meaning “satisfied.” Moreover, as we will see later in this chapter, tone languages, which comprise about half the languages in the world, use prosody even more extensively to encode lexical contrasts, but with pitch variation rather than stress assignment as the relevant acoustic parameter (Yip, 2003; Maddieson, 2005b).