prosody (linguistics)

In linguistics, prosody (from Greek προσωδία) is the study of rhythm, intonation, and related attributes in speech. It describes all the acoustic properties of speech that cannot be predicted from a local window on the orthographic (or similar) transcription. So, prosody is relative to a default pronunciation of a phoneme/feature bundle/segment/syllable; it does not include coarticulation because coarticulation is predictable from the immediate phonological or orthographic neighborhood. Qualitatively, one can understand prosody as the difference (in terms of acoustic properties) between a well-performed play, and one on first reading.
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