Introduction and Overview: Prosody

Stefan Baumann
IfL Phonetik, University of Cologne

The talk gives an overview of the two general tasks of prosody in many languages, namely highlighting and phrasing, and the phonetic parameters used to fulfil these tasks. As a step further, specific functions of prosody (mainly in West-Germanic languages) will be introduced, including the marking of information structure on various levels (in particular focus-background and information status) and by various means (e.g. deaccentuation, pitch accent type).
However, prosody should not only be regarded as a marker of other linguistic levels, since it is structured itself. The grammatical aspects of prosody, which are subject of phonological representations, can be claimed to subsume three types of structure, namely prosodic constituent structure (cf. Prosodic Hierarchy), metrical structure (relative strength of syllables and words) and tonal structure (location and type of pitch accents and boundary tones). Some factors influencing prosodic structure will be discussed.