Suprasegmentals

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Features of speech that extend beyond individual sounds including stress, intonation, and rhythm which affect meaning and expression
2. Elements of spoken language that go beyond phonemes such as pitch, loudness, and timing to convey emotion and sentence structure
3. Acoustic properties in speech like tone, emphasis, and duration that influence how phrases and utterances are understood beyond their basic sounds

Etymology: "Suprasegmentals" is a modern technical coinage built from Latin, not an ancient term. Its root is "segment," from Latin "segmentum," meaning a piece cut off, and the prefix "supra-" means "above" or "over." Linguists use "segmental" for the individual sounds of speech, the consonants and vowels that can be separated out and written as discrete units. The suprasegmental features are the layer that sits above those units, stretching across whole syllables, words or phrases. The name thus describes the feature's position in the speech signal. Pitch, stress, length and rhythm do not belong to any single sound; they ride over several sounds at once. A rising pitch can turn a statement into a question, and a stressed syllable can shift the meaning of a compound, so the same consonants and vowels can carry quite different messages depending on these overlaid features.

Synonyms: prosodic features, intonation, stress, tone