Functions and mechanisms in linguistic research - lessons from speech prosody

Human speech, as a collection of complex phenomena, can be explored from many different angles, and interesting data can be generated with various approaches. However, if we aim to substantially improve our understanding of speech, it is advantageous to focus on the communicative functions and the mechanisms that enable these functions. This paper uses prosodic phenomena in speech as examples to illustrate the necessity as well as potential benefits of such function- and mechanism-oriented approaches.