Besides defining prosody, exploring prosody and early work on spoken discourse, and discussing structural and interactional dimensions of prosody in talk-in-interaction, this essay examines prosody as a pragmatic phenomenon. It is argued that if one wants to come to terms with prosodic phenomena as they function in genuine language communication, the structuralistic framework is of limited value, as the relation between prosody and its context is a reflexive one, as might be expected in general of indexical signs. Also, as Silverstein has put it, prosody is often “beyond the limits of pragmatic awareness” (1976).