Prosody: What is it and Why does it Matter?

This lecture will discuss three aspects of prosody: stress, phrasing, and fundamental frequency. In each, hierarchical structure will be illustrated. Stress will be presented within the framework of metrical phonology, emphasizing its relational nature and showing example spectrograms in which it causes allophonic and durational variation. This will lead into models of phrasing, and here again hierarchical organization will be presented, with examples of the influence of prosodic boundaries on allophonic variation, phoneme substitution, duration and voice quality. Finally the roles of fundamental frequency will be presented. At this stage spectrograms will be supplemented with plots of concomitant fundamental frequency contours. Pitch accents and boundary tones will be illustrated, as will relationships between fundamental frequency and segmental phonetic structure, and prosodic organization spanning multiple intonational phrases.