What term describes the sound-related features that apply to the whole utterance, including word boundaries?

• A. Redundancy
• B. Suprasegmental
• C. Cotext
• D. Copula verb

Answer: (B)

Suprasegmental features are the sound-related cues that extend over the entire utterance and across word boundaries. They include intonation, stress, rhythm, tempo, and juncture, which shape how the spoken message is organized and interpreted beyond individual sounds. These features signal things like a sentence type (question vs. statement), emphasis, and grouping of words, helping listeners parse the utterance as a single, coherent unit. The other terms don’t describe this broad, utterance-wide pattern: redundancy involves repeating information, cotext refers to surrounding linguistic context, and a copula verb is a grammatical linking word, not a feature of how the whole utterance sounds.