Talk:Prosody (linguistics)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Phonetics, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to phonetics and descriptive phonology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

This article may be too technical for a general audience.
Please help improve this article by providing more context and better explanations of technical details to make it more accessible, without removing technical details. See below for more information.

An anon editor wrote that breathing only corresponds to prosodic boundaries in careful speech, as when reading. Actually, audible breathing is an extremely reliable indicator of prosodic boundaries. (Remember, we're not talking about syntactic boundaries here.) In reviewing the pitch traces of hundreds of prosodic units from spontaneous English conversation, I have never once come across a breath in the middle of a prosodic contour. In fact, breathing occurs at major prosodic units, and is generally accompanied by a reset in pitch and speed. Similar results obtain for other European, Asian, African, and American languages. kwami 11:38, 21 November 2005 (UTC)