We study prosody because we observe that it is a meaningful, functional component of language. We transcribe it with the goal of abstractly understanding the contrastive elements that speakers seem to be perceiving and producing (and the system of interaction for those elements). This is analogous to other aspects of linguistics; e.g., we could roughly say that phonology seeks to understand the system of sound elements in human languages.

We study prosody because we observe that it is a meaningful, functional component of language. We transcribe it with the goal of abstractly understanding the contrastive elements that speakers seem to be perceiving and producing (and the system of interaction for those elements). This is analogous to other aspects of linguistics; e.g., we could roughly say that (segmental) phonology seeks to understand the system of sound elements in human languages.