Segmental And Suprasegmental

SEGMENTAL AND SUPRASEGMENTAL
Segmental phonology is, as the name suggests, concerned with the segments of sound. For example, the English word "cat" consists of three segments, represented as "c","a", and "t" in the spelling. Phonologists are interested in why, for example, there is an English word "cat", and another English word "act", but no "cta" or "tca".
Suprasegmental phonology isconcerned with other aspects of phonology, such as tone, stress and intonation. In some periods, suprasegmental phonology has been rather ignored compared to segmental phonology. This is presumably because,in most fields of scientific inquiry with the exception of physics, a linear world view has held sway, and also because the orthography of languages such as English encourages one to see the soundsystem as being a simple linear sequence of segments.
In written English we use punctuation to signal some things like emphasis, and the speedwith which we want our readers to move at certain points.In spoken English we use sounds in ways that do not apply to individual segments but to stretches of spoken discourse from words to phrases, clauses and sentences. Such effects are describedas non-segmental orsuprasegmental - or, using the adjective in a plural nominal (noun) form, simplysuprasegmentals.
Among these effects are such things as stress, intonation, tempo and rhythm - whichcollectively are known as prosodic features. Other effects arise from altering the quality of the voice, making it breathy or husky and changing what is sometimes called the timbre - and theseare paralinguistic features. Both of these kinds of effect may signal meaning. But they do not do so consistently from one language to another, and this can cause confusion to students learning a second language. Prosodic features
• Stress or loudness - increasing volume is a simple way of giving emphasis, and this is a crude measure of stress. But it is usually combined with other things like changes in...