Suprasegmentals

The prosodic structure of languages is divided into word prosody and sentence prosody. Beyond an organization of vowels and consonants into syllables, languages may have segmental length, tone, and stress, in any combination. The prosodic structure of words can be inferred from their pronunciation by abstracting away from the phonological phrasing structure (the prosodic hierarchy) and the tonal structure of the intonational melody. Boundary tones delimit larger phonological phrase types and some languages have phrase-internal tones (pitch accents). Word prosody distinctions encode lexical and grammatical morphemes, prosodic phrasing imperfectly reflects syntactic structure, and melodic contrasts signal discourse and focus meanings.