Melodies Bristling with Change

Abstract

Speech is organized in time through modulations of such perceptual dimensions as pitch, loudness, and tempo. These prosodic modulations help transform a stream of vocal sounds into meaningful speech—i.e., into something that has unity, pattern, replicability, and predictability. Prosodic patterning helps set up retrospective and prospective understandings of the speaker's utterances. If we understand meaning relations in speech as social relations, there is always a large element of interpretation involved in the analysis of meaning. The prosodic modulatons of speech provide clues to the listener as to how the speaker intends information to be organized into chunks that can then be highlighted, contrasted, or compared to each other. In this article the most important perceptual features of prosody are described, examples are given of how prosodic variations affect the understanding of intent and content, and a brief sample of crosscultural interaction is analyzed in which misunderstanding occurred between speakers who shared lexical and grammatical systems, but did not share prosodic systems.