THE MEANING OF THE TERMS ‘PROSODY’ AND ‘INTONATION’ IN THE ENGLISH PHONETIC TERMINOLOGY

Since phonetic terms ‘prosody' and ‘intonation' are used interchangeably by many authors, this article explores the terms' semantics and function by means of analysing various specialised English texts (linguistic articles and dictionary entries). The component analysis results point out that ‘prosody' is used in most cases to denote pause, stress and rhythm, while ‘intonation' more often covers melody, syllabic characteristics, loudness and timbre. The analysis of English specialised texts demonstrates that ‘prosody' has broader semantics: it ei- ther includes intonation itself or some of its components (stress, tone and others), thus making the two terms only conditional synonyms with overlapping semantic structures