prosody

n. Prosody refers to the suprasegmental tiers of the phonological structure of an utterance. Prosody therefore includes specifications related to intonation (realized acoustically in modulations of pitch), rhythm(with acoustic correlates in the duration of phonetic segments and periods of silence), and, to a certain extent, loudness (linked to the amplitude of the signal). Lexical stress is a prosodic phenomenon realized suprasegmentally. A word might consist of a sequence of consonants and vowels – say, [nunu]. These might be clustered into two rhythmic units, or syllables: [nu.nu]. Of these, perhaps the first syllable is uttered with higher pitch, longer duration, and greater amplitude and thus receives stress: ['nu.nu]. Prosodic phenomena may span more than one segment, more than one syllable, and more than one word. For example, speakers of American English use prosody to distinguish between interrogatives and declaratives and to disambiguate between certain types of structural ambiguities. – EMF

▶ See also INTONATION and RHYTHM