The use of prosody in the production of meaning

Abstract

During the presentation, Anne Wichmann explains how prosody can be used to attribute pragmatic meaning to utterances, give structure to the text read aloud, negotiate turn-taking, demonstrate a set of emotions, and dis-play marked speech styles. Therefore, prosody can be employed by the speaker to give a different meaning to the utterances, which are syntactical-ly similar, but are pragmatically different because of the intonation. It can also be used by the reader to mark the structural parts of the text as title, subtitle, and paragraph. Besides, prosody can be employed to negotiate turn-taking between speaker and listener, demonstrate emotions and pre-sent marked speech styles, such as the following reading styles: news, storytelling/audiobook, liturgy, and poetry recitation.