Glossary of terms

Prosody

“Prosodic” is increasingly used in a way that is more or less synonymous with “suprasegmental”, but the traditional definition of prosody is related to poetic metrics, etc., and tends to focus more on the organisation of phonological materials (segments, etc.) into larger constituents or domains (foot, phrase, etc.)

Suprasegmental

Suprasegmental features are traditionally defined as pitch, stress, and quantity (or F0, loudness/intensity, and duration – details of definition depend on whether you have a phonetic, psychophysical, or acoustic perspective).

Suprasegmental features may be part of the lexical make-up of individual words (e.g. word stress, lexical/grammatical tone, phonemic length), or they may be “postlexical”, affecting the meaning of whole phrases or sentences, in which case lexical identity is unaffected (e.g. intonational “tune”, sentence stress).

Intonation

“Intonation” often refers loosely to almost any postlexical or utterance-level prosodic or suprasegmental properties of speech. In a narrower use of the term, intonation is restricted to pitch, and excludes paralinguistic features such as range and voice quality.

Tone

Tone often refers specifically to lexical tone (i.e. lexical rather than post-lexical uses of pitch), and in this sense “tone” and “intonation” are often felt to be opposites. However, the phonological structure of intonation is often described as involving a sequence of “tones” that are formally identical to lexical tones