Linguistics

1. INTRODUCTION TO
SUPRASEGMENTAL FEATURES

2. ∗ In linguistics, prosody refers to intonation, rhythm
and vocal stress in speech.
∗ The prosodic features of a unit of speech whether a
syllable, word, phrase or clause are called
suprasegmental features because they affect all the
segments of the unit.
∗ Suprasegmental features operate over longer
stretches of speech, such as rhythm and voice quality
as opposed to segmental features, which are the
individual sounds.

3. Length – The amount of time it takes
to produce a sound
∗ Some sounds are longer than others.
Beat Bead
∗ If you were to pronounce both words with longer
vowels, the pronunciation might seem strange but
the meaning is not lost. In other words, the
meaning of beat and bead are the same.

4. ∗ But in other languages, vowel length actually
changes the meaning of words. Therefore,
pronunciation of the lengthened sound is very
important because the word means something
completely different.
∗ In English, you can express your emotions by
lengthening certain sounds in sentences. By varying
the tempo of the words (such as lengthening
specific sounds) you can communicate your
feelings.

5. Intonation – The rising and falling of
the voice (pitch) over a stretch of
sentence
∗ If pitch varies over an entire phrase or sentence, we
call the different pitch curves by the term
intonation.
∗ Intonation conveys the speaker’s attitude or
feelings. In other words, intonation can convey
anger, sarcasm or various emotions.

6. Stress (tense or lax syllables) and
Juncture (pauses within sentences
to separate words and meaning)
∗ In English, the stress you place on a syllable can
change the meaning of a word.
∗ When combined with pausing after certain words,
the meaning of the whole sentence can completely
change.
Light housekeeping means chores
such as sweeping, mopping, and A tight-rope walker is an acrobat.
cleaning windows.
A tight ropewalker is a drunken
Lighthouse keeping is running ropewalker.
lighthouse operations.

7. Tone – The rising and falling of pitch
in a syllable
∗ If the pitch of a single syllable or word has the effect
of influencing the meaning of the word, we call the
different pitch distributions by the term tone.
∗ Every language uses pitch as intonation, but only
some languages use it as tone.

8. ∗ There are two basic types of tones in tone languages.
Register tones are measured by contrasts in the absolute pitch of
different syllables. Register tones may be high, mid, or low. Many
West African languages use contrasts of high mid and low tones to
distinguish word meaning.
Contour tones are tones involving a pitch shift upward or downward
on a single syllable. Many languages of East and Southeast Asia use
contour tones, the best known being Mandarin Chinese.
Mandarin has four tones for [ma:].
Each word means something
different ("mother," "hemp,"
"horse," "scold.")