Prosody as a window into speaker attitudes and interpersonal stance

Abstract

New research is exploring ways that prosody fulfils different social-pragmatic functions in spoken language by revealing the mental or affective state of the speaker, thereby contributing to an understanding of speaker’s meaning. Prosody is often pivotal in signaling speaker attitudes or stance in the interpersonal context of the speaker-hearer; in contrast to the vocal communication of emotions, the significance of prosodic cues serving an emotive or interpersonal function is often dependent on the type of speech act being made and other contextual-situational parameters. Here, we discuss recent acoustic-perceptual studies in our lab demonstrating how prosody marks the interpersonal stance of a speaker and how this information is used by listeners to uncover social intentions that may be non-literal or covert. Focusing on how prosody operates in the communication of politeness, ironic attitudes, and sincerity, our data add to research on the acoustic-perceptual characteristics of prosody in these interpersonal contexts. Future implications for how acoustic cues underlying “prosodic attitudes” affect the interpretive process during on-line speech processing and how they influence behavioral outcomes are considered.