Summary

The term prosody was originally used in poetics, while intonation was described in linguistics. Today both terms may be applied to different types of discourse.

Prosodic features are variations in pitch, loudness, tempo, rhythm, and voice quality. In the Russian linguistic tradition they were all covered by the term intonation as its components: speech melody, sentence stress, tempo, rhythm, timbre. In the English tradition only pitch variations used to convey meaning were called intonation. We have to admit that pitch is the most linguistic prosodic feature.

Intonation operates at the linguistic level, starting from a sentence. Prosody operates from the syllable to the whole text. Intonation is more commonly described in its syntactical, attitudinal, accentual and discourse functions. Prosody is more commonly viewed in its structural and social (indexical) functions.

What we hear as pitch, loudness, length, voice quality may be measured acoustically as fundamental frequency, intensity, duration, spectral characteristics. Thus perceptual features have their acoustic correlates.

Intonation features shared by all the languages are called universal; when typical of a group of languages they are typological, others are language-specific.

Universal are intonation groupings, nucleus placement, nuclear tones in statements and questions, declination, intonation of emotions, indexical features of status and style, intonation acquisition.

Language-specific are realizational features in pitch configurations, in tone usage, in the length of intonation groups. English and Russian have a lot in common in their intonation systems but certain cultural differences and tone configurations are important to consider for successive intercultural communication.