This book presents the author's personal overview of Speech Prosody, and in particular the different areas in which he has been especially interested over the last few decades. These include the acoustics of speech prosody, prosodic transcription, the relationship between lexical and non-lexical prosody, the nature of prosodic structure, the phonology of prosody, the modeling of rhythm and of melody, and the central question of the various and at times quite mysterious ways in which prosody contributes to the interpretation of an utterance. In a final chapter the author briefly outlines the directions which he believes may prove the most productive and fruitful for future work in the field of Speech Prosody.
