Suprasegmental, also called Prosodic Feature, in phonetics, a speech feature such as stress, tone, or word juncture that accompanies or is added over consonants and vowels; these features are not limited to single sounds but often extend over syllables, words, or phrases. They are features over above the segmental values such as place or manner of articulation, thus the supra- in segmental.The term prosodic comes from poetry, where it refers to the metrical structure of verse. One of the essential characteristics of poetry is the placement of stress on particular syllables, which defines the versification of the poem. According to Kim Ballard in his book The framework of English, in suprasegmental phonolgy we will be going beyond …show more content…
Stress is a suprasegmental feature of utterances. It applies not to individual vowels and consonants but to whole syllables_whatever they might be. A stressed syllable is pronounced with greater amount of energy than an unstressed syllable, and is more prominent in the flow of speech. We will mark a stressed syllable in transcription by placing a small vertical line (') high up, just before the syllable it relate to or we can say a vertical superscript line in front of …show more content…
Whatever the tone is adopted, we can be certain that gold would be one of the stressed syllables in the example given its status as a monosyllabic lexical word.
Simple tones
• Gold in the above example will be uttered on a level tone if the speaker did not wish to draw any particular attention to this word, so there is no any noticeable change in pitch. We can indicate that syllable has a level tone by proceeding it with a horizontal line: _gold.
• However, if the speaker wished to draw any more attention to gold then it will be uttered in falling tone. This means that pitch of gold would move from high to low. A falling tone is usually used to express certainty or finality. It is represented like: \gold.
In contrast to falling tone, gold could be uttered with rising tone. Again, rise could be relatively gentle or more marked ('gold) depending on the degree of attention the speaker wanted to draw to the word in question.Thus rising tone in contrast with falling tone, tends to suggest surprise or incompleteness.
Complex