A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

394 protasis
unit, such as consonant or vowel, whereas prosodies are features extending over
stretches of utterance (one talks of ‘sentence prosodies’, ‘syllable prosodies’,
etc.) – a notion which took on a more central role in later thinking (see below,
and also the concept of ‘semantic prosody’ in lexicology: see semantics). Not
only would pitch, stress and juncture patterns be subsumed under the heading
of prosody, but such features as secondary articulations would also be
included, e.g. lip-rounding or nasalization, when these are used to account
for phonotactic restrictions, or to characterize grammatical structure (as in
the notion of ‘vowel harmony’). Another feature of Firth’s prosodic analysis
is its polysystemic principle: it permits different phonological systems to be
set up at different places in grammatical, lexical or phonological structure: e.g.
the contrasts which occur at the beginning of a word may not be the same as
those which occur at the end, and this fact is given special attention in this
approach.
In phonemic phonology, linguistically contrastive prosodic features are often
referred to as prosodemes. In generative phonology, prosodic features are
considered to be one of the five main dimensions of classification of speech
sounds (the others being major class features, cavity features, mannerof-articulation
features and source features). Recently, the term has been
applied to a model of morphology in which non-linear phonological representations
play a central role. Using notation derived from autosegmental
phonology, the approach is based on the view that information about the
canonical pattern of segments in a form (the prosodic template) is represented
on a different tier from information about the kinds of segments occurring
in the form. In metrical phonology, one of the levels of structure in a
metrical tree is referred to as a prosodic level.
In prosodic morphology, the focus is specifically on the way in which morphological
and phonological determinants of linguistic form interact, and the notion
of prosody becomes more powerful, as it is seen to determine the structure
of morphological templates. This approach makes reference to the prosodic
morphology hypothesis (templates are defined in terms of the units in a prosodic
hierarchy – mora, syllable, foot and prosodic word) and the notion of
prosodic circumscription (the domain to which morphological operations apply
is circumscribed by prosodic as well as morphological criteria). In an alternative
account, p-structure (i.e. ‘prosodic structure’) is seen as a level at which syntactic
and phonological components interact, with its own hierarchical organization
of four domains – phonological word, phonological phrase, intonational phrase
and utterance – the properties of which are specified by prosodic hierarchy
theory (‘hierarchy’ here referring to a higher level of structural organization
than in the case of prosodic morphology). Some model of a prosodic hierarchy
is assumed in most modern phonological frameworks.
protasis (n.) /cpr∞tvs}s/
see apodosis
prothesis (n.) A term used in phonetics and phonology to refer to a type
of intrusion, where an extra sound has been inserted initially in a word:
a type of epenthesis. Prothetic sounds are common both in historical change
(e.g. Latin spiritus ⇒ French esprit) and in connected speech (e.g. left turn
pronounced as / v left tvpn/).