ABSTRACT
Prosody is a term which refers to the transsegmental or suprasegmental aspects of speech, that is, to those aspects of pronunciation which span more than one segment or which are the property of stretches of speech rather than individual sounds. Conservatively, prosody refers to the patterns in individual words of stress, of pitch and of tone, as well as the rhythmic and intonational patterns of longer utterances. In a more liberal definition, the topic of prosody or suprasegmental phonology includes voice setting, or voice quality, and a variety of contextual effects, specifically, those fluent speech phenomena which involve phonological fluency as opposed to other types of fluency. Considering the physiological interrelations and the fuzzy functional boundaries between voice quality and other aspects of prosody, it seems counterproductive to separate out this aspect of language from the general discussion of prosody, especially when the underlying purpose is to help language learners achieve full communicative competence in a second language.
