6 - Prosody and gesture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
Summary
‘How do I stop people getting angry?’ I asked. In effect, this meant how could I stop them from having any vocal variation whatsoever? I also wanted to know why they made faces and insisted on making their voices dance even though they could see it upset me. ‘How do other people learn these things?’ I wanted to know. ‘They learn them naturally,’ Dr Marek said.
(Williams 1994, p. 103)PROSODY
Commentators on the effects of prosody on comprehension are broadly agreed that prosodic inputs to the comprehension process range from the ‘natural’ (e.g. an angry, friendly or agitated tone of voice) to the properly linguistic (e.g. lexical stress or lexical tone). Some propose that prosodic effects range along a continuum from ‘more to less linguistic’, or from ‘natural’ to language-specific (Gussenhoven 2002, Pell 2002), but typically, accounts of prosody tend to favour either a predominantly natural view or a predominantly linguistic one.
Dwight Bolinger (1983) takes the view that we would be better to focus more on the natural side of intonation, for example. Indeed his analysis might be seen as an attempt to characterise intonation as one kind of natural code, focusing as he does on the interaction between intonation and other ‘natural’ components of the complex communicative stimulus:
If intonation is part of a gestural complex whose primitive and still surviving function is – however elaborated and refined – the signalling of emotions and their degrees of intensity, then there should be many obvious ways in which visible and audible gesture are coupled to produce similar and reinforcing effects. […]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Pragmatics and Non-Verbal Communication , pp. 139 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009