Prosodic categories are functional phonetic categories which occur in parallel with lexically relevant segmental items such as phonemes and syllables, or which structure sentences and larger discourse units; they may be lexically or sentence-syntactically functional.
A number of systems for prosodic transcription have been developed, most of which concentrate on features which are relevant for intonation.
Prosodic features need to be classified according to their linguistic function and their correlates in the three subdomains of phonetics:
| Category | Meaning | Phonetic correlates | ||
| Articulatory | Acoustic | Auditory | ||
| Intonation | Discourse structuring | phonation rate | fundamental frequency (F0) | pitch |
| Stress/Accent | Focussing | phonation rate change | F0 change | pitch change |
| overall effort increase | overall energy increase | overall loudness increase | ||
Sometimes the terminology is used loosely in the phonetic and engineering literature, unfortunately.
It is important to remember that the relations between these categories are not simple; accent, for instance, is often simply perceived as loudness, but this is a `holistic' impression resulting from changes in pitch and increased duration, rather than loudness in the sense of increased amplitude.