prosody

This term describes the melodic and rhythmic architecture of language, encompassing the rise and fall of pitch, the duration of sounds, and the placement of stress. In linguistics, it refers to the non-segmental features of speech that convey emotion, emphasis, or grammatical structure, acting as a layer of meaning above the actual words spoken. In a literary context, it shifts toward the formal study of versification. It involves the technical analysis of meter and rhyme schemes to understand how the sonic texture of a poem contributes to its overall mood or meaning.