The term prosodeme has been used in recent writings on phonemcis as a stylistic variant of prosodic phoneme to describe such modifications of the basic speech sounds as tone, stress, and duration. Bloch and Trager, in 1942, also included juncture as a ‘related phenomenon’. In his recent postulates for phonemic analysis, Bloch appears to have been unable to find any common denominator for these features, since he abstracts duration at one point of his analysis, pitch and stress at quite another, and finds no basis at all for including juncture. In general, the distinction that has been made in recent American writings on the subject has been one between so-called segmental and suprasegmental phonemes. Some sounds are thought of as occurring one after another, like bricks in a wall, while others occur simultaneously with these and usually span a number of the individual bricks at a time. There are troublesome aspects of this definition, since there are some simultaneous linguistic phenomena, which, as Bloch says in his article on postulates (§48.2), ‘we do not usually wish to treat in the same way’. It will be the purpose of this paper to consider more closely the nature of the prosodemes, and see if it may not be possible to find a common factor which sets them off from the usual linear phonemes. We shall question the use of the term ‘suprasegmental’ as an adequate description of the prosodemes, and ask whether we are justified in classifying the prosodemes as a special kind of phoneme.