Syllabus
1. Specific properties of prosodic phenomena; general principles of description; possibilities of functional applications; prosody in classical phonological theories.
2. Prominence and segmentation; units of prosody description, their attributes and hierarchy.
3. Structural description at word level; variants of speech rhythm; tone languages.
4. Phonological system of sentence prosody; current concepts of description of intonational structure of languages; limitations of prosodic transcription.
5. Throughout: perception tests on specific parts of the syllabus.
Annotation
The course introduces the suprasegmental level of the description of language and speech sound structure. The explanation follows mainly the relationship between the descriptive terms and the sound reality.
The ability to analyze specific speech samples through selected means is also emphasised. Systematic description of Czech is complemented with comparisons with other languages.
Students' presentations and practical analysis of speech samples form a part of the course work.