prosody

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)The study of rhythm, intonation, stress, and related attributes in speech.

   “An accurate acquaintance with the Prosody and Metres of the Greek Language is so necessary an accompaniment of true scholarship, that any attempt to advocate its claims to the notice of the student would be entirely superfluous.”

   “The aim of this book is to answer the question WHAT DID GREEK PROSODY SOUND LIKE? The study of prosody stands at the intersection of a number of quite disparate disciplines, as illustrated in the diagram overleaf.”

   “2007, Jackson T. Gandour, Neural substrates underlying the perception of linguistic prosody, Tomas Riad, Carlos Gussenhoven (editors), Tones and Tunes, Volume 2: Experimental Studies in Word and Sentence Prosody, De Gruyter (Mouton de Gruyter), page 3, Brain imaging data shows us moreover that we have to go beyond linguistic units themselves to gain a full understanding of how prosody is processed in the brain.”

2. (countable, uncountable)The study of poetic meter; the patterns of sounds and rhythms in verse.

   “But the system of prosody in Samson plainly forbids extrametrical syllables in the midst of the line, and there is certainly no other example.”

   “Or again, Otto Eißfeldt's eight-page summary of conflicting scholarly theories on biblical prosody painfully illustrates how the scholars have read biblical poetry with roughly the intellectual apparatus appropriate to the decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions, multiplying confusion by the invention of elaborate pseudo-mathematical systems of scansion or by the wholesale importation of terms and concepts from Greek prosody.”