Volume 10, Issue 1 - Special Issue: The prosodic expression of linguistic im/politeness in Romance Languages

This paper outlines the important relationship between prosody and im/politeness and presents a brief overview of what has been done in this field. Sections 2, 3 and 4 present several theoretical concepts which are especially relevant for understanding im/politeness in concrete frameworks (mainly in conversation). Section 5 points out the necessity of studying a pragmatic phenomenon like im/politeness with its prosodic expression. Finally, section 6 discusses some studies in this field on different languages, with a special focus on prosodic values like the F 0 (pitch/fundamental frequency), intonation patterns, duration and speech rate.

This paper analyzes three Spanish particles, namely al parecer, por lo visto and según parece , whose status as pure evidentials (i.e., elements that only convey “source of information”) has been put into question. The aim of this study is twofold: firstly, to observe the incidence of prosody in triggering the contextual meanings usually expressed by evidentials, i.e., politeness, impoliteness and self-image activities; secondly, to find out whether their prosodic behaviour provides any hint of their core meaning being “source of information”. In order to carry out this analysis, a corpus of circa three million words of Peninsular Spanish has been compiled, which aims to reflect a variety of registers (formal and informal) and genres (both confrontational and non-confrontational). The study reveals different prosodic behaviours exhibited by pure evidentials on the one hand, and contextual meanings on the other. Theoretically speaking, the concept of “relational work” embraces all the contextual meanings, and therefore explains the prosodic difference more effectively than other concepts. On the other hand, data show a high number of cases in Spanish where evidentials are used with their pure meaning, thus supporting the existence of elements exclusively conveying “source of information”, without any further contextual nuance.

From a theoretical perspective based on the Theory of Argumentation in Language ( Théorie de l’Argumentation dans la Langue – TAL) and the Theory of Polyphony ( Théorie de la Polyphonie Énonciative – TPE), the present study describes and analyses polyphonic configurations that are disclosed through the use of certain voice traits; configurations which, unmistakably common to both French and Spanish, are manifested by what is said and what is prosodically shown in utterances. Within a French corpus and a Spanish corpus of naturally occurring discourse, the patent polyphonic dimension of intonation has been explored in order to demonstrate that locutors’ utterances themselves reveal the orientation of enunciation through both the marking of the lexical and grammatical components and the prosody within which they are embedded. Through this study, the authors show how the locutor – the discursive character presented by the utterance as responsible for its enunciation – puts on stage a multiplicity of enunciators, or viewpoints, which allow him or her to protect the image of self, i.e., the locutor’s own image, and expose, protect or enhance that of others. Polyphony is materialized in two different ways: one in which the enunciator embodied in the prosody reinforces the locutor’s assimilation to the wording of the utterance and another in which the enunciator corresponding to the intonational feature does not match what is expressed through words.

The linguistic feature of intensity, lying “at the heart of social and emotional expression” (Labov 1984: 43), is significantly intertwined with politeness. In relation with intensity (that is, both upgrading and downgrading), the role of context and prosody in modifying and expressing politeness is discussed here in a pragmatic perspective. The complex interplay between intensity, politeness and prosody is explored with reference to several examples related to Italian, showing both the crucial role of prosody in conveying politeness and intensity and the relevance of global and local context parameters. In the paper, prosody acts as a pivot, with regard to which we discuss the status of the other components. In particular, it is shown to play an important role in constructing politeness and its variations of intensity under the influence of contextual parameter. Prosody may perform a primary distinctive function, or may jointly with other convergent or divergent cues express the meaning and politeness intended by the speaker. However, the overall effect of a speech act in terms of politeness is shown to be due to the variegated intertwinement between context, intensity and prosody, which is at play with or without other linguistic forms of politeness and accounts for the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between politeness and single utterance features.

This paper presents a descriptive model of the melodic characteristics of expressions of politeness attenuators in Catalan, based on the acoustic analysis of a spontaneous speech corpus and its subsequent perceptive validation. The model allows the pragmatic analysis of the phenomenon to be covered, as well as offering future guidelines for its teaching. In addition, the results of the analysis reflect the extensive character of the phenomenon, which surpasses the strict limits of idiomatic code, and allows inter-linguistic analysis. The paper is the product of the collaboration between the Melodic Analysis of Speech and Fonocortesía research projects.