Suprasegmental Features or Prosodic features.

Suprasegmental Features

In Phonology, there are two aspects for  sound system. They are segmentals ( what you say), and Superasegmantals (how you way what you say). 

Segmentals includes vowels, diphthongs, tripthongs, consonants... etc. Which are called segmental phonemes. 

Superasegmental features  tend to indicate the emotional state of the speaker. This is something beyond the segmentals. The components of Superasegmantal features consists of stress, length, pitch, intonation, tone, Juncture.... etc

Stress

Stress is the relative emphasis that may be given certain syllables in a word. 

In words of more than one syllable, all the syllables are not articulated with same force. We used to stress some words than the others. So stress is the degree of force with which sound of syllable is uttered. 

For noun, stress falls on first syllable and for verb, it is on second syllable. 

'Convict(N)      Con' vict (V) 

 'Permit (N)       Per' mit( V) 

 ' Object (N)      Ob' ject(V) 

 ' Export (N)       Ex' port(V) 

 ' Absent (N)       Ab' sent(V) 

Compound words stress on first syllable. Eg:

 'Birthday

'Water proof 

' Life jacket 

'Tea bag

' Crossword 

'Wholesale

Compound words stress on second syllable. Eg:

Him' self

What'ever

Second' handed 

Open' minded 

Sentence stress

It means the  stress given to particular words within sentence. Through this the listener can understand what he/she wanted to convey. Content words are often stressed and grammatical words are often unstressed. 

Eg:

'Jack and' Jill 'went up the' hill

'This is the 'house that' Mohan ' built. 

Lenth 

Length is the time it takes to pronounce a phoneme. 

[ bar],  [ba:r] in this two words, we can use long vowel and short vowel. It indicates it's length. 

Rhythm

Rhythm is often created through the use of syllables. When we speak, we naturally emphasise some syllables over others. Longer syllables are known as "stressed" syllables and shorter ones are "unstressed". 

Juncture

Juncture means the pause between two words or  morphemes in a compound word. Juncture is compulsory when there have confusion between two words. 

Eg : Ice Cream      > I Scream

        My train        > Might rain

        Great Tapes  > Grey tapes

         A dress        > Address

Pitch

In connected speech, the pitch of the voice is continuously rising and falling. Pitch of the voice determined by the rate of vocal cord vibrates. 

Tone is the pitch movement.

Tone are divided into two kinetic and static. Kinetic tone is occurred when  there is a change in pitch. If there is no varying of pitch, it is called static. 

Intonation 

In linguistics, intonation is the variation of pitch while speaking. Intonation and stress are  two main elements in  linguistic prosody. Intonation helps us to recognize the language the same way the melody of a song helps recognize the song we hear. 

Intonation is about how we say things, rather than what we say. 

These are the major Superasegmantal features which help to complete what we really want to convey to our listeners.