Prosody In Emotional Speech

The purpose of this study is to explore and explain the association between the written and oral expression of emotions in three fairy tales drawing upon the system of APPRAISAL – AFFECT and GRADUATION – and an adaptation of Roach, Stibbard, Osborne, Arnfield, and Setter’s (1998) phonetic taxonomy. The sample consisted of stories written by the brothers Grimm and read aloud in British English. The analysis conducted was both qualitative and quantitative. Emotion terms were first manually labelled for INSCRIBED AFFECT and the tone units containing those terms were perceptually valued in terms of the suprasegmental and paralinguistic features used by the storyteller.  These qualitative results were then transformed into quantitative information as percentages were calculated for i) AFFECT subtypes, ii) GRADUATION modes and iii) frequency of occurrence of suprasegmental values. Additional quantitative information (acoustic numerical measures) was obtained for pitch height and range, loudness and tempo. In order to analyse the qualitative and quantitative data, a sequential mixed methods research design was adopted. On the basis of the results obtained the association between the written and oral expression of emotion has been described and explained and a provisional taxonomy of phonetic profiles for the INSCRIBED AFFECT subtypes has been proposed. This study also found that different degrees of intensification may be realized by means of written and phonetic resources and that these resources may exhibit a linear correlation. Based on the generalizations obtained, pedagogical implications have been suggested for the teaching and learning of the expression of emotions when reading aloud fairy tales at university level EFL teacher training programs.

The tendency to use a lower voice in public speeches may be well justified by evolutionary and social factors. Low, stable voice is often associated with authority and persuasive power while high-pitched voices are linked to intensive active emotions. In this light, the occurrence of extremely high intonation peaks or falsetto voice in public speeches by male speakers is puzzling and requires explanation. In this study we analyse the usage of high-pitched intonation peaks in ten male members of the Polish parliament based on recordings selected from the MuMo Stance Corpus of German and Polish Parliamentary Speeches. The speeches are scrutinized for high pitched prominences using the criteria of (a) relative pitch range and (b) top pitch value relative to the mean pitch of each speaker. The material includes also prominence areas annotations for: hand gestures, head, body movements, and the discourse functions realized by the respective utterances. We qualitatively explore on the distribution, form, and function of high-pitched prominences, and their co-occurrence with gestures and body movements. We find the usage of high-pitched prominences to significantly differ among and within speeches. While they tend to co-occur with gestures, the connection of their characteristics with gestural features is not straightforward.

In order to shed light on how emotions surface in language, this article addresses a gap in our empirical knowledge about 'expressive' linguistic resources. Expressive resources are classically defined as 'symptoms' or 'indices' of the speaker's emotional states at the time of speech, which suggests that they are essentially reflex – i.e. spontaneous and sincere. This article shows how actual expressive resources largely depart from this ideal type, by analyzing a case where they are performed and operate in a frame where sincerity remains largely irrelevant. Based on first-hand data, the study analyzes how expressivity combines with performance in a highly conventionalized prosodic contour used to express compassion in several Aboriginal languages of the Arnhem Land region in Australia. The form, semantics and pragmatics of this contour are described and analysed for the Dalabon (Gunwinyguan) and Kriol language (creole), and the study of how it is used shows that performance can channel elaborate communication around deep emotions such as grief. The article discusses how the performance of this 'compassionate' contour contributes to communication strategies that help the speakers deal with grief, and highlights how this performed linguistic tool channels emotional expression and management at the same time.