As humans' most sophisticated means of communication, the code of language exploits numerous formal devices in order to get the meaning of the message across. When words are strung together, the resulting meaning of the whole structure is a function of the semantic properties of the individual lexical items and of the syntactic relations that hold among them. It is also a function of the linguistic and situational context in which the utterance is produced. When speech is uttered, the vocal organs are set into motion in order to generate the sound pattern that corresponds to the underlying linguistic elements. In this generation process the speaker does not merely articulate the successive speech sounds that make up an utterance, but simultaneously controls other vocal features such as loudness, tempo, rhythm, pitch, voice quality, etc. The latter variations do not shape the phonetic identity of the segmental speech-sounds, but constitute a truly ‘supraseg-mental’ or ‘prosodic’ layer in the sound pattern. The prosody of an utterance adds an expressive dimension to the communication process: by modifying the prosodic features the speaker can supplement his utterance with elements of meaning that are not explicitly contained in its lexical and syntactic make-up.