The common reference to the speech signal allows to align prosodic annotations with orthographic transcription and higher linguistic levels, enabling cross level analyses. 1.1 Scope Prosodic phenomena are specific to spoken language. Such acoustic modulations are used by human speakers to express a variety of linguistic or paralinguistic features, from stress and syntactic boundaries, to focus and emphasis or pragmatical and emotional attitudes. Linguistics and speech technology have approached prosody from a variety of points of view, so that a precise definition of the scope of prosodic research is not easy. A main distinction can be drawn between acoustic-phonetic analyses of prosody and more abstract, linguistic, phonological approaches.
Prosodic units are the natural scope of prosodic events.
Although prosody is by definition suprasegmental , prosodic analyses take often the phoneme as their minimal unit, where to measure rhythmical variations and locate intonation events. Such prosodic features are physically realized in the speech chain in terms of variations of a set of acoustic parameters. Depending on the research purpose and point of view, prosodic phenomena can be marked in a speech corpus by simple diacritics in its orthographic transcription, or by labels classifying intonation contours and unit boundaries according to some phonological theory, or by detailed measures of the acoustic-phonetic parameters. We refer to D1.1 for a more detailed discussion concerning prosodic phenomena and their possible codings. Existing Schemes Coding prosody appears as a complex task, which has to deal with the intrinsic complexity of prosodic phenomena and with the variety of purposes, theories and points of view from which prosody can be approached.