Prosody

In phonetics and phonology, prosody is the study of the role of acoustic and perceptual parameters such as fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, duration, rhythm, loudness, pitch, and tempo. The term prosody is often used as a synonym for suprasegmentals, although its meaning is narrower: it only refers to the features mentioned above.

Polysemy
Prosody can also refer to
 * the study of metre in verse (see prosody (of verse))
 * a phonological feature having as its domain more than a segment (see prosody (Firthian))

Synonym

 * suprasegmental phonology

Origin
The term goes back to Classical Greek prosoodía 'a song sung to music; (a mark to show) tone or accent of a syllable'. This general sense is apparently a recent generalization of Firth's use (see prosody (Firthian)).

Other languages
German Prosodie

Links

 * Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics
 * Audio demonstration synthetic sentence prosody