Intonational sentence-type conventions for perlocutionary effects: An experimental investigation

Abstract

One of the major open issues in semantics and pragmatics concerns the role of convention in relating sentence types with illocutionary acts and perlocutionary effects. For the type-to-illocution connection, some degree of force conventionalism seems to be widely accepted. In contrast, Austin (1962) and many subsequent researchers have assumed that perlocution is not a matter of convention, but rather arises inexorably from illocution, content, and context. In this paper, we challenge this fundamental assumption about perlocution with evidence from a new perception experiment focused on perlocutionary effects relating to the listener's conception of the speaker as a social actor. We find that these effects are predictable from sentence type plus intonation ('type + tune'), that they vary by type + tune, and that they are consistent across a wide range of sentence contents, contexts, and illocutionary inferences. We argue that these conventions are naturally incorporated into existing work on sentence-type conventions.

Affect and iconicity in phonological variation

“…Given previous work on the emotional or affective indices of these contours (e.g. Jeong & Potts 2016), we predicted that the falling token would yield significantly more positive affective evaluation scores than the level token.…”

“…Experimental studies of intonation support Bolinger's view. Jeong's (2016) study of the perception of polar interrogatives as questions, invitations, or commands shows a conventional association between affective prosodic meanings and illocutionary force. And her study (Jeong 2018) of rising declaratives shows that the steeper the slope of a rising contour, the more likely it is to be heard as inquisitive rather than assertive.…”

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody

“…(e.g. among many others, Nash and Mulac 1980;Gussenhoven and Rietveld 1991;Hirschberg and Ward 1992;Chen et al 2004a;Watson et al 2008b;Jeong and Potts 2016;Goodhue and Wagner 2018). Let us consider De Marneffe and Tonhauser (2016) as an example to illustrate that relating empirical findings to theory is not straightforward.…”

Culture and paralinguistic features ~!^^:-): East meets West in a virtual exchange between South Korea and England

“…Mehrabian (1971) found that over 90% of face-to-face message interpretation is derived from paralinguistic features such as tone of voice, intonation, and facial expressions. Despite the methodological flaws in Mehrabian's (1971) research (only female participants were used and it was based on judgements of individual words), the notion that non-verbal features play a pivotal role in face-to-face communication has gained empirical support (Argyle, 1988;Jeong & Potts, 2016).…”