Hi! I’m Joel and this is The Glossary, a bi-weekly supplement to Learned. This week, we're thinking about how we talk.
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Recently, I've been building up a lexicon of useful definitions and terms to have on hand when researching and writing about linguistics. This week, we're looking at the term "prosody." If the previous entries on semiotics and semantics were about the meaning of our words, prosody is about the rhythm of our speech.
Prosody comes to English from a Greek root that meant a variation in the pitch of a song. It retains that meaning in a modern linguistic context, although the definition has been slightly expanded. From the Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics:
Linguistic characteristics such as stress, intonation, and pauses in speech that concern units greater than the individual phonemes. Prosody also includes speech tempo and rhythm.
So what does that mean? A simplified but useful way of looking at prosody is to examine how we describe speech in fiction. Let's take a simple sentence: "We are one." Outside of any other context, it's hard to give the sentence any real meaning. But, what happens when we use a verb that describes talking?
She said, "we are one."
He sang, "we are one."
They chanted, "we are one."
He intoned, "we are one."
Each of those dialogue-verbs brings a different idea of the sentence to mind. We could take it a step further by adding adverbs like "cautiously, carelessly, sarcastically, forcefully" and so on. Most likely you can "hear" the sentence in your mind in different ways based on the descriptors of it. Back in the real world, away from the written word, how we understand that a particular vocalization of the sentence, e.g. how someone would intone something carefully, is prosody.
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New Learned on Monday. Until then, stay sharp, stay focussed. Learn something.
Joel