  The present contribution is a tutorial on selected aspects of prosody, the
rhythms and melodies of speech, based on a course of the same name at the
Summer School on Contemporary Phonetics and Phonology at Tongji University,
Shanghai, China in July 2016. The tutorial is not intended as an introduction
to experimental methodology or as an overview of the literature on the topic,
but as an outline of observationally accessible aspects of fundamental
frequency and timing patterns with the aid of computational visualisation,
situated in a semiotic framework of sign ranks and interpretations. After an
informal introduction to the basic concepts of prosody in the introduction and
a discussion of the place of prosody in the architecture of language, a
selection of acoustic phonetic topics in phonemic tone and accent prosody, word
prosody, phrasal prosody and discourse prosody are discussed, and a stylisation
method for visualising aspects of prosody is introduced. Examples are taken
from a number of typologically different languages: Anyi/Agni (Niger-Congo>Kwa,
Ivory Coast), English, Kuki-Thadou (Sino-Tibetan, North-East India and
Myanmar), Mandarin Chinese, Tem (Niger-Congo>Gur, Togo) and Farsi. The main
focus is on fundamental frequency patterns, but issues of timing and rhythm are
also discussed. In the final section, further reading and possible future
research directions are outlined.
