What does prosody do?
To show the range of information that can be carried by prosody, observe an elegant experiment by Stan Freberg (1950):
The text has virtually no lexical information, but it still tells a story.
Stan Freberg was a comedian, and it’s quite funny.   It’s called “John and Marsha”, and tells the story of a romance prosodically, using only the words “John” and “Marsha”.