Which term includes stress, rhythm, pitch, tempo and intonation used to mark key meanings?

• A. Prosodic Features
• B. Paralinguistic Features
• C. Tag Question
• D. Status

Answer: (A)

Prosody covers how speech is delivered—the rhythm, stress, pitch, tempo, and intonation that organize spoken language and signal emphasis, questions, or attitude. These elements aren’t about the literal words themselves but about how they’re spoken, which is how meaning is shaped in real communication. Because you’re looking at how key meanings are marked through speaker’s delivery, the best term is prosodic features, since it encompasses all these aspects of spoken voice.

Paralinguistic features refer more broadly to nonverbal cues and vocal characteristics outside the linguistic content, such as body language or facial expressions, and while some vocal cues can overlap, the specific set listed—stress, rhythm, pitch, tempo, intonation—belongs to prosody. The other options describe different ideas (a tag question is a specific sentence-ending device; status doesn’t capture how tone and delivery affect meaning), so they don’t fit the concept of how speech is prosodically organized.