Abstract
AbstractSpeech simultaneously conveys both propositional and indexical meaning. This is approximately the difference between ‘what you said’ and ‘the way you said it’. Some indexical meaning is conveyed by arbitrary language-specific devices such as lexical choice and sociophonetic variation, but some is conveyed by paralinguistic cues (‘tone of voice’, ‘body language’) that are broadly speaking universal. Describing the universal aspects in terms of gradient ‘modulation’ of the phonetic manifestations of phonological categories expresses their formal similarity to sociophonetic variation. However, in some languages modulation may also be categorical, in phenomena like ideophones and ablaut morphology, and in these it plays a more centrally linguistic or propositional role.
Published Version
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