LING 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Grammaticalization, Paralanguage, Downstep
24 Dec 2018
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Document Summary
Speech can reflect how familiar we are with our interlocutor, how anxious or relaxed we are, how confident we are, how happy or sad we are, and more generally how excited we are. These factors influence the prosodic patterns of speech. These aspects of the prosodic patterns of utterances are often called paralinguistic, since they lie outside of what linguistic theories usually try to explain. And yet there are some systematic patterns that should be of interest to linguists, but they are understudied. Some aspects of paralinguistic patterns have been argued to be universal. Frequency code (ohala 1983): in avian and mammalian (non-human) competitive encounters vocalizations by dominant or aggressive individuals are low-pitched, those of subordinate or submissive individuals are high-pitched. Together with formant differnces (lower formants in male vs. female individuals), this is a size" code. (this has been related to grammaticalized question vs. declarative intonation, but the relationship is tenuous).
