The nature of prosody

Unlike the well-established fields of grammar and segmental phonology, the field of prosody requires a certain amount of exposition before one can talk about its development in children. What range of data is to be subsumed under this heading? For present purposes, it will be useful to select three main themes from the prosodic literature, reviewed, for example, in Crystal (1969, 1975): (a) What is excluded from the domain of a prosodic theory? (b) What variations in prosodic form may be identified? (c) What range of prosodic functions may be established?

The first question may be answered briefly, as its purpose is solely to relate prosody to other areas with which it is often confused. Given a specification of semiotic behaviour as ‘patterned human communication in all its modes’ (Sebeok, Hayes and Bateson 1964), then prosodic features can be identified as one component of the auditory–vocal dimension of communication, i.e. excluding the visual (‘kinetic’), tactile (‘proxemic’) and other communicative modes referred to globally under the general heading of ‘nonverbal communication’ (see Argyle 1975). Within the auditory–vocal area, a distinction is conventionally made between segmental and nonsegmental phonology, the latter usually being defined as the ‘residue’ of the former – what is left after one has studied the vowel/consonant/syllabic system of sounds.