A Prosody Handbook

This guide to versification is immensely useful for anyone interested in poetry or in general poetic structure. Concise and informal, it offers a systematic study of meter, tempo, rhyme, and other components of verse.

A practical guide to versification: filled with examples from English and American poets of many periods.

This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.

A practical guide to versification: filled with examples from English and American poets of many periods.

The reconstruction of the prosody of a dead language is, on the face of it, an almost impossible undertaking. However, once a general theory of prosody has been developed from eliable data in living languages, it is possible to exploit texts as sources of answers to questions that would normally be answered in the laboratory. In this work, the authors interpret the evidence of Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on crosslinguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data, and reconstruct the syllable structure, rhythm, accent, phrasing, and intonation of classical Greek speech. Sophisticated statistical analyses are employed to support an impressive range of new findings which relate not only to phonetics and phonology, but also to pragmatics and the syntax-phonology interface.

Language prosody deals with the elements of speech that are properties of syllables and larger units of speech but are not distinct phonetic segments. These elements are known as suprasegmentals and include linguistic functions such as intonation, tone, rhythm and stress. Prosody reflects the various features of the utterance or the speaker. These features include the emotional state of the speaker, the form of the utterance, the presence of irony or sarcasm, and emphasis, contrast and focus. Prosody may also reflect other elements of grammar that may not be encoded by grammar or by choice of vocabulary. Auditory measures, which are subjective, and acoustic and articulatory measures, which are objective, are differentiated in the study of prosody. This book provides comprehensive insights into the field of language prosody. From theories to research to practical applications, case studies related to all contemporary topics of relevance to this field have been included herein. Researchers and students in this field will be assisted by this book.