The subject of this work is the empirical investigation of the prosodic expression of authentic emotions. By deliberately designing the recording situation, a corpus of speech data was compiled that exhibits the following characteristics: casual speech behavior and a variety of everyday emotions, all while maintaining very high recording quality. The conversation-analytic and acoustic description of the extensive speech material leads to two central findings: On one hand, a simple prosody model for German was developed, which includes two global prosodic units (intonation patterns) with redesyntactic function and five local prosodic units with information-structuring and communication-organizing functions. On the other hand, the prosodic expression of emotions is examined for the first time based on this data.