Prosody and Iconicity PDF
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Prosody and Iconicity Iconicity in Language and Literature A multidisciplinary book series which aims to provide evidence for the pervasive presence of iconicity as a cognitive process in all forms of verbal communication. Iconicity, i.e. form miming meaning and/or form miming form, is an inherently interdisciplinary phenomenon, involving linguistic and textual aspects and linking them to visual and acoustic features. The focus of the series is on the discovery of iconicity in all circumstances in which language is created, ranging from language acquisition, the development of Pidgins and Creoles, processes of language change, to translation and the more literary uses of language. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/ill Editors Olga Fischer Christina Ljungberg University of Amsterdam University of Zurich Volume 13 Prosody and Iconicity Edited by Sylvie Hancil and Daniel Hirst Prosody and Iconicity Edited by Sylvie Hancil Université de Rouen Daniel Hirst Laboratoire Parole & Langage, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prosody and iconicity / Edited by Sylvie Hancil and Daniel Hirst. p. cm. (Iconicity in Language and Literature, issn 1873-5037 ; v. 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Iconicity (Linguistics) 2. Versification. 3. Language and languages--Versification I. Hancil, Sylvie, editor of compilation. II. Hirst, Daniel, editor of compilation. P99.4.I26P76 2013 414’.6--dc23 2012049583 isbn 978 90 272 4349 2 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 7219 5 (Eb) © 2013 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa Table of contents Introduction vii Sylvie Hancil Prosodic iconicity and experiential blending 1 Antoine Auchlin Emotional expressions as communicative signals 33 Yi Xu, Andrew Kelly & Cameron Smillie Peak alignment and surprise reading: Is there any systematic correlation in Italian (Spoken in Florence)? 61 Olga Kellert Emotional McGurk effect and gender difference – A Swedish study 75 Åsa Abelin Beyond the given: An enunciative approach to the prosody of thematicity in English 89 Steven Schaefer Pragmatic functions and the biological codes: Evidence from the prosody of sentence topic and focus in Egyptian Arabic declaratives 109 Dina El Zarka Pitch accent types and the perception of focus in Majorcan Catalan wh-questions 127 Maria del Mar Vanrell UK declarative rises and the frequency code 149 Daniel Hirst Iconic interpretation of rhythm in speech 161 Tea Pršir & Anne Catherine Simon Iconicity of melodic contours in French 181 Philippe Martin vi Prosody and Iconicity A study of postural, mimetic and gestural indicators combined with prosodic indicators: Perceptions of attitudes in French on the basis of a visually enacted oral discourse 193 Véronique Gosson Automatic detection of emotion from real-life data 219 Laurence Devillers Prosody and phonemes: On the influence of speaking style 233 Björn Schuller Index 251 Introduction Sylvie Hancil University of Rouen This volume, which is the result of a symposium held at Aix in November 2008 and an international conference at Rouen in April 2009, contains a col- lection of papers which explore the interaction between iconicity and prosody. The 13 contributions investigate a number of themes which are central, some of them being treated in a new and original way, such as experiential blending, emotions and attitudes, information structure, Gussenhoven’s biological codes, arbitrariness, rhythm, nonverbal expression, and automatic detection. The papers analyze authentic examples from English and other languages, such as French, Italian, Swedish, Egyptian Arabic, and Majorcan Catalan. The wide, empirical orientation of the collection should appeal to any scholar or student interested in p rosodic iconicity. The volume sheds new light on the interrelation between prosody and ico- nicity by enlarging the number of parameters traditionally considered and by confronting various theoretical models. The parameters taken into account may include but are not limited to the following: socio-linguistic criteria (age, sex, socio-economic category, region), different kinds of speech situations, affect (attitudes and emotions), gestures, and morpho-syntactic constraints. The analysis is pursued in various theoretical frameworks such as experiential blending, Infor- mation Structure, grammaticalization theory, Gussenhoven’s biological codes and prosodic modeling. In the paper that opens the volume, Antoine Auchlin looks at prosodic iconicity in speech from a wide, experiential and embodied perspective (cf. Núñez 1999; Violi 2003; Rohrer 2007, and others). In this view, commu- nication is defined as a ‘co-experienciation’ process. Using different paths, the variations in prosodic dimensions involve perception and motor activation, for both speakers and hearers – at the schematic and pre-motor levels (Skipper et al. 2006). Prosodies impose direct, non-mediated shaping of shared experi- ence, and prosodic iconic formations take place in that space of shared and shaped experience. Auchlin addresses the question of how prosodic icons mix with meaning in discourse where they occur. Through the examination of a number of examples, Auchlin suggests that their mutual contribution may be schematized using Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) Conceptual Blending viii Sylvie Hancil Theory. However, following Hutchins’ (2005) observations concerning ‘mate- rial anchors’, and Bache’s (2005) distinction of level- specificity for integration processes, Auchlin suggests that some accommodation of Conceptual Blend- ing is necessary. For instance, this accommodation has to take into account two major features of prosodic iconic displays: first, blending input spaces are substantially distinct, verbal-conceptual on one side, and sensori-motor on the other; and second, blending creative output space is not essentially conceptual and abstract – it is experiential, involving sensori-motor activation schemes as outer frames for integration. Yi Xu, Andrew Kelly & Cameron Smillie underline the fact that it is widely assumed that emotional expressions are intended to reveal one’s internal feel- ings. However, no theoretical models have so far been developed to explain how exactly specific internal feelings are reflected in the emotional expressions. Their paper explores the idea that human vocal expressions of emotions are evolution- arily shaped to elicit behaviours that may benefit the vocalizer. As such they are not arbitrary signals although their meanings are often not intuitively transparent thanks to the deep evolutionary root that makes them highly automatic. More specifically, the authors propose that vocal emotional expressions are designed to influence the behaviour of the receivers by manipulating the vocal signal along a set of bio-informational dimensions, namely, ‘size projection’, ‘dynamicity’, ‘audibility’ and ‘association’. They also present new experimental data in support of the model. The first experiment shows that listeners’ judgement of anger and happiness can be effectively influenced by body-size related acoustic manipula- tions imposed on naturally spoken words in neutral emotion. The second experi- ment demonstrates that listeners’ judgement of happiness, anger, fear and sadness are consistently related to acoustic manipulations along the size projection and dynamicity dimensions imposed onto an entire sentence spoken in neutral emo- tion. Finally, the authors demonstrate that the proposed bio-informational dimen- sions allow emotional meanings to be encoded in parallel with non-emotional meanings in speech, thus providing support for the previously proposed PENTA model of speech prosody. Olga Kellert’s paper addresses the question whether the expression of surprise or unexpectedness in spoken Italian (as spoken in Florence) correlates with late alignment of F0 peak with the segmental string in prenuclear position, as was already attested for some languages (Kohler 2006 and his colleagues for German, Chen et al. 2004 for English and Dutch, Arvaniti & Garding 2007 for some vari- ants of English). Corpus analysis of Italian spontaneous speech has shown a nega- tive match between expressions which semantically express surprise, so called exclamatives, and a late peak alignment (i.e. realised after the onset of the follow- ing unaccented syllable) in the prenuclear position. Two experiments investigated Introduction i the question whether listeners systematically interpret surprise or unexpected- ness by means of intonation alone. The results show that the recognition effects by intonation are significantly lower than the recognition effects by context. The last section of the paper discusses the different uses of the term ‘surprise’. Following the seminal work by Scherer (1981), and Bänziger and Scherer (2005), who inves- tigated the correlation between emotional states (e.g. joy) and speech, the paper investigates the question whether there is a psycho-physiological state that may be associated with ‘surprise’ and whether this state may be linked to some prosodic properties of speech other than peak alignment (e.g. extensive pitch variability, hyperarticulation, speech rate, voice quality, etc.). Åsa Abelin’s study concerns the integration of visual and auditory informa- tion in the perception of emotions, and especially the effect of contradictory information in the McGurk condition. Video and audio recordings of emotional expressions of one male Swedish speaker and one female Swedish speaker were used in order to perform a McGurk experiment. The two speakers were video and audio recorded expressing the five emotions ‘happiness’, ‘anger’, ‘surprise’, ‘fear’ and ‘disgust’, saying “hallo, hallo”. The audio and the video for the five emotions were separated and then combined to form the 13 McGurk stimuli. The stimuli of the male and the female speaker were presented to 10 male and 10 female per- ceivers each, all native speakers of Swedish. The perceivers judging the emotional expressions, in general, relied more on the face than on the voice in interpreting the incongruous emotions. Perceivers were also better at interpreting the face of the person of their own sex. The specific emotion ‘happiness’ was interpreted best visually and was the most difficult to identify from the voice. The emotion anger was mostly interpreted best visually with the exception that male listeners detected anger better auditorily in the male speaker. The female listeners were in general better at interpreting the visual channel, and the males better at interpreting the auditory channel. The results are consistent with findings in other languages: facial expression has a larger impact on judgements than prosody, and happiness is more easily recognized from the face than from the voice. Steven Schaefer’s paper, drawing on a corpus-based pilot study of intona- tion contours, sheds new light on the relationship between prosody (as accen- tuation and intonational melody) and – for the speaker – the pertinence of utterance elements receiving some degree of prosodic prominence. The meth- odological protocol adopted here is to take a number of lexical items that are textually repeated, a ‘given’ element being defined simply as a recurrent item. The literature invariably predicts that it will be de-accented with repetition though this was seldom the case in our corpus. It is argued that utterance ele- ments receiving prosodic prominence primarily have subjective pertinence; the oft-claimed principle of a one-to-one iconic relationship between ‘new/given’
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