Table Of ContentProsody 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’
