Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles: Reduction and Elaboration in Speech Communication

Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
September 30 - October 2, 1991

        

Linguistic Functions of Prosody

Luiz Carlos Cagliari

UNICAMP-IEL, Brasil

This paper is an outline of the most important linguistic functions of the prosodic units. These units are defined as phonetic features that have at least the length of a syllable, such as tones, intonation, tessitura, mora, pause, stress, rhythm, arsis/tesis, loudness, register and voice quality.

The linguistic functions are presented in relation to phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis.

Prosody causes specific phonological processes, it determines syntactic structures, it specifies semantic meanings and it contributes to the organization of sentences in the discourse, among other linguistic functions.

Prosodic units do not occur in language in a random manner but they share specific language conventions with well defined framework.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Cagliari, Luiz Carlos (1991): "Linguistic functions of prosody", In PPoSpSt-1991, paper 015.