Prosody, the rhythmic and tonal organization of speech, plays an integral role in communication. I will discuss, how categorical and gradient changes can be understood as the scaling of one control parameter modulating different prosodic dimensions at the same time and how modulations can change in relative importance when investigating different speaking styles, such as loud and habitual speech (Roessig & Mücke 2019; Pagel et al. 2021). From a methodological perspective, I will also demonstrate the relative importance of acoustic and articulatory variables conducted on a dataset on focus marking in German and relate the results to the question of errors in the interpretation of phonetic data (Mücke et al. 2020).