The emergence of prosody in linguistic theory

Prosody is a unique character in the production of sounds. Human speech is particularly marked by prosody for various functions in the different aspects of linguistics (e.g. phonology, morphology, sociolinguistics). The importance of prosody in human language had been known since very early periods of modern civilisation. Both Western and Eastern traditions had put a lot of emphasis on the proper practice of prosodic rhymes and rhythms in the use of language whether it was for analysing grammar or for praying to God or any other superior spirit. Subsequent developments in linguistics have revealed the central role played by prosody in determining the innate grammar of human language. This paper attempts to discuss in brief the evolution of the thought on prosody and its current standing in the field of linguistics.peer-reviewe

THE KNOWLEDGE OF PROSODY IN HELPING STUDENTS RESPONSE UTTERANCES APPROPRIATELY

In spoken discourse, besides the use of vocal and gestural signs, prosody is an important part to consider since without appropriate prosody- Intonation and accent and the meaningful elements of speech apart from the words that are uttered (Kreidler, 1998), the speaker may fail to deliver the meanings and the listeners may fail to catch the message. Then, it results in misunderstanding. This study is conducted to find out whether the knowledge of prosody helps students to communicate appropriately. The participants of this study are 20 students who joined semantics and 20 students who did not take semantics. They were asked to give appropriate respond to contrast the 20 utterance which have emphases. The utterances are recorded and transcribed. Triangulation was done by another person to get the accuracy of the data. The result shows that there are more students (85% ) who have knowledge of prosody able to respond the utterances appropriately. This proves that teaching prosody is essensial to make the students realize the function of prosody

Intonation and discourse : biased questions

This paper surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure.We discuss English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what we call “focus” questions. We postulate that these question types are complex speech acts and outline an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to account for the interactions between prosody and discourse

Assessing the Prosody of Non-Native Speakers of English: Measures and Feature Sets

In this paper, we describe a new database with audio recordings of non-native (L2) speakers of English, and the perceptual evaluation experiment conducted with native English speakers for assessing the prosody of each recording. These annotations are then used to compute the gold standard using different methods, and a series of regression experiments is conducted to evaluate their impact on the performance of a regression model predicting the degree of Abstract naturalness of L2 speech. Further, we compare the relevance of different feature groups modelling prosody in general (without speech tempo), speech rate and pauses modelling speech tempo (fluency), voice quality, and a variety of spectral features. We also discuss the impact of various fusion strategies on performance.Overall, our results demonstrate that the prosody of non-native speakers of English as L2 can be reliably assessed using supra- segmental audio features; prosodic features seem to be the most important ones