Pitch range, gestural information, and perceived politeness in Catalan

Abstract

It is known that certain prosodic aspects of speech play a role in the expression of paralinguistic meaning, yet the concrete mechanisms of how this is implemented have not yet been fleshed out. The present article attempts to explore the contribution of pitch range to the expression of politeness in information-seeking yes-no questions in Catalan. Two perception experiments were carried out with stimuli that contained a gradual increase and decrease of the pitch range at the end of two target intonation contours (rising and falling). The results of the first experiment revealed that, for both contours, increasing the pitch range of the final part of the utterance tone resulted in a decrease of perceived politeness, whereas decreasing the pitch range had no effect. The second perception experiment showed that adding contextual (gestural) information reversed the tendency. Taken together, these results point to the complex interaction between prosodic cues and contextual information (specifically, facial gestures). There is nothing intrinsically polite about using an increased pitch range, unless it is accompanied by consistent contextual information. In sum, when assessing the degree of perceived politeness of an utterance, attention has to be paid to various prosodic aspects together with contextual and gestural information.

Boundary tones in non-native speech: The transfer of pragmatic strategies from L1 Swedish into L2 Spanish

“…The socio-pragmatic effects of rising boundary tones in Spanish and Catalán have been investigated in a couple of studies (Orozco 2008;Nadeu and Prieto 2011;Álvarez and Blondet 2003). However, these analyses, which were performed on elicited read-out speech and not on spontaneous data, have shown results that are not entirely unequivocal.…”

On the importance of the prosodic component in the expression of linguistic im/politeness

“…These phenomena are suprasegmental, i.e., have effects on groups of linguistic items or segments, like phonemes. Literature has focused more on the suprasegmental/ prosodic expression of im/politeness (Roldán 2000;Culpeper et al 2003;Wichmann 2004;Hidalgo 2006;Lin et al 2006;Stadler 2006;Nadeu 2008;Orozco 2008;Grawunder and Winter 2010;Alvarez Muro et al 2011;Nadeu and Prieto 2011). The most frequently used parameters in the literature to carry out prosodic analyses are the following: (a) Pitch (melodic/intonation wave).…”

Cost of the action and social distance affect the selection of question intonation in Catalan

“…Nadeu and Prieto (2011) manipulated the final pitch of each pattern in two perception experiments in regular steps and concluded that both intonation patterns were equally polite.…”