ABSTRACT
Prosody has been defined as the “grouping and relative prominence of the elements making up the speech signal” (Pierrehumbert, 1999). That is, prosody serves both a grouping function and a prominence-marking function in speech. As examples of the grouping function, some ways in which smaller units are combined to form larger ones (perhaps via intermediate groupings) include: segments combine to form syllables, syllables combine to form words, and words combine to form phrases. As examples of the prominence-marking function, there are at least two levels of prominence in English: lexical stress, or prominence at the word level, and pitch accent, or prominence at a phrasal level.
|
Some prosodic constituents |
Some levels of prominence |
|---|---|
|
• Utterance |
• Nuclear accent |
|
• Intonational phrase |
• Pitch accent |
|
• Smaller phrases: Phonological phrase/ |
• Lexical primary stress |
|
Intermediate phrase/Accentual phrase |
• Lexical secondary stress |
|
• Phonological word |
|
|
• Foot |
|
|
• Syllable |
|
|
• Mora |
