Back in the days of ancient grammar, people tried to find explanations for various linguistic phenomena. Thus arose the teaching of stress - prosody. This phenomenon serves to explain the stress and length of syllables. In addition, it has a rather ambiguous interpretation.
Term
Prosody is now being considered from several sides, therefore it does not have a clear definition. For example, in phonetics, prosody is the science of various suprasegmental units of sound. This refers to intonation, tone, stress, etc.
In poetry, the same term has a broader concept. It aims to study metrically significant elements of speech. This includes all varieties of syllables, pauses. Perhaps synonymous with rhythm.
Other options
Among other things, prosody often means a speech melody, various speech characteristics: timbre and temporal, rhythm, verbal tones. Pointing to the concept of “prosody of speech”, they most often mean intonation, although these two terms are also distinguishable from each other.
With certainty, several concepts can be distinguished: the prosody of the syllable, word, and speech itself (intonation).
Syllable
Speaking about the syllable, it is worth noting that in this case the tone serves as prosody. In the world there are a huge number of languages that use syllable tones as a hallmark. Thanks to this, one can point to semantic contrasts.
In total, two tones can be distinguished: level and contour. The first option usually refers to tones of different levels: high, low, medium, intermediate. Usually this prosody is characterized by African languages and the speech of the American Indians. Contouring system includes sliding tones. In this case, it implies an upward, downward tone, as well as their combination. This option is usually endowed with speeches in East Asia.
Word
Speaking of the word, prosody is an emphasis. Here it is understood that often syllables, uniting into a word, create an integral structure. Thus, they have a special rhythmic organization. Each word has an accent, that is, a highlighted syllable. The rest are unstressed in relation to the selected. So you can highlight the sound stream and note the rhythmic quanta. Among other things, there is another way to highlight the phonetics of a word. It's about timbre prosody.
Although, nevertheless, if it comes to the prosody of the word, it is necessary, first of all, to talk about stress. In this case, prosody has certain functions. For example, the climactic. She is responsible for underlining the word “center”. Significant is characterized by freedom and at the same time limitedness. So, this function is able to highlight not only the grammatical form, but also pay attention to lexemes and the lexical-semantic version of the word. The delimatic function of verbal prosody indicates an emphasis that marks the boundary of the word and is fixed.
Prosodica
Some identify the terms prosody and prosody. This opinion is erroneous, since the concepts relate to different areas. "Prosodica" was introduced in the 70s of the last century. It was then that interest appeared in the study of the text and its analysis. In this case, the term was introduced to distinguish between. The term prosody is used when considering a syllable, but prosody is a broad concept and applies to all segment units. That is, it can be used not only with the syllable, but also with the phrase, word, paragraph and text.
Difference
It is also worth distinguishing between the terms “intonation” and “prosody”. Many consider them synonymous, although there is still a cardinal opinion. Both terms are multicomponent. Both include melody and stress, tone, rhythm, pauses, timbre and so on.
On the other hand, prosody is only a phenomenon that distinguishes syllables and determines their combination in the phonetics of a word. But intonation can affect the semantic content, modality, communicative meaning. Also distinguishes the syntactic features of speech.
Functions
One way or another, it is possible to distinguish the function of prosody, regardless of which area this term belongs to. So, a communicative function is highlighted, which allows you to form a special statement that has communicative features. Emotionally modal function is now becoming less and less popular. In addition, recent studies suggest that there is no connection between the emotional component and prosody.
The personality-social function is now little studied. However, it is the identifier of the person who speaks. She can indicate his social status, cultural development, etc.
The structuring function has more to do with writing. It is directly related to the formation of the structure of the text. Another function that relates to written speech, or rather directly to the text, is rhythm-forming and style-forming. Both are responsible for the analysis of the text, require analysis of it, the establishment of boundaries between parts of speech, units of text, etc.