When speaking, speakers break down the continuous stream of sounds into smaller units – so-called intonation phrases. Within these intonation phrases, we find a rhythmic pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables, similar to the word stress that we already saw in individual words. This chapter investigates which principles speakers follow when rhythmically grouping the speech flow. Like word stress, the rhythmic structure of utterances does not distinguish meaning in English, or it only does so in a very limited way. However, it does serve important linguistic functions. Additionally, speakers pronounce intonation phrases with specific melodic patterns. Intonation will be dealt with in detail in the subsequent chapter. Rhythm and intonation constitute the suprasegmental level. Even though the suprasegmental level plays a secondary role in the language system of English, rhythm and intonation serve several crucial functions in communicative situations.

The relationship between context and prosody is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive ones in language. At the same time, it is one of the most difficult to describe because it is based on acoustic cues that only need milliseconds to create an image in our brain. However, speakers of a language can generally understand their interlocutors’ emotional and cognitive status through their prosodic realization. Prosodic pragmatics is the branch of pragmatics that attempts to identify the intentionality of the speaker’s meaning in a real context based on the analysis of the suprasegmental aspects of speech production. If prosody studies how an utterance is pronounced in unison with the perceptual features of pitch, length, and loudness, then prosodic pragmatics studies the acoustic and cognitive contextual parameters in conversation. The chapter will show the relationship between prosody, information, and context in communication. Starting from the essential acoustic parameters of speech, it will revise the most influential theories of intonation through the prosodic pragmatics lens to understand the cognitive adaptation of a message in a specific context.