Paralanguage

11 Key excerpts on "Paralanguage"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Handbook of Semiotics

  • Winfried Noth, Winfried Nöth(Authors)
  • 1990(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  1.1 The Scope of Paralanguage The term Paralanguage suggests a vast field of communicative phenomena beyond language, but this chapter adopts a narrower view of this field. 1.1.1 PARALINGUISTICS IN THE BROADEST SENSE In his survey of current trends in paralinguis-tics, Crystal shows that the scope of paralan-guage has been defined in seven different ways, as including 1. nonhuman as well as human vocalizations, 2. nonvocal as well as vocal features of human communication, 3. all nonsegmemal ('suprasegmemal') fea-tures and some segmental ones, 4. voice quality as well as (all or most) nonseg-mental features, 5. only nonsegmental features, but excluding prosodic phonemes and voice quality, 6. only a subset of nonsegmental features other than prosodic phonemes and voice quality, and 7. certain communicative functions, such as the expression of emotions or personality (1975: 47-64). 1 and 2 are very broad definitions of paralan-guage. While the first includes acoustic modes of zoosemiotic communication, the second covers the whole field of nonverbal communi-cation. This broad view of paralinguistics is 1. LANGUAGE AND Paralanguage I 247 shared by linguists such as Abercrombie (1968), laver (1976), and Lyons (1977: 57-6 7) but is not adopted in this handbook. 1.1.2 Paralanguage IN THE NARROWER SENSE In this handbook, the term Paralanguage will be restricted to human vocalizations only, whereas zoosemiotic and nonverbal communi-cation are ascribed a more independent status within the semiotic field. Paralanguage in this narrower sense is outlined in Crystal's defini-tions 3-7. These characterize Paralanguage as being vocal, human, and nonphonologi-cal communication. The differences between these definitions indicate different views of the scope of linguistics.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

  • Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, Deborah Schiffrin(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Paralanguage was described as phenomena that are found in “systematic association with language” including vocal qualities, vocal qualifiers, and vocalizations (Birdwhistell 1961: 52). For English, Trager (1958) defined eight categories of voice qualities, used over seg- ments of speech. These are pitch range, vocalic control (e.g., hoarseness to openness), glottis control (e.g., breathiness), pitch control (sharp or smooth transition), articula- tion control (precise, relaxed), rhythm control (smooth to jerky), resonance, and tempo. Vocalizations include laughing, crying, yelling, whispering, moaning, and yawning, to name a few. Vocal qualifiers are degrees of intensity, pitch height, and uttering rate. Each of these was divided into levels above and below a “baseline” of unmarked speech. The concept of Paralanguage was problematic from the beginning since what was deemed “outside” or “in association with” language in one language could fall fully within language in another. Catford (1964) worked to overcome unexamined categor- ical assignments of speech features by using “contrastive function” as the criterion to distinguish phonological function from what he called paraphonological and non- phonological functions. Phonological functions contrast grammatical or lexical forms; paraphonological functions contrast linguistic contexts (such as junctures); and non- phonological functions contrast features of the speech situation and social categories such as sex, age, health, class, and origin. Catford’s schema shows some parallels to one based on semiotic properties developed in part through the work of Jakobson (1960) and Silverstein (1976), who define sign activity at linguistic, metalinguistic, and metaprag- matic levels.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Language and Man

  Anthropological Issues

  • William C. McCormack, Stephen A. Wurm, William C. McCormack, Stephen A. Wurm(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The author suggests, however, that positive conclusions on this topic are probably false and at best premature. The term Paralanguage has in many ways been more of a hindrance 1 4 DAVID CRYSTAL than a help to progress in our understanding of nonverbal vocal be-havior. The appealing simplicity of the dualism language-Paralanguage led very early on within linguistics to an interpretation of paralan-guage as a communicational residue; whatever features of vocal behavior could not be coped with by one's model of language were labelled paralinguistic. Paralanguage came to be used as a convenient cover term for a miscellany of unanalyzed phenomena, whose theoret-ical homogeneity was uncritically assumed. The dualism became institu-tionalized when Paralanguage was classed along with nonvocal modes of communication under the general heading of semiotics (see Sebeok, Hayes, and Bateson 1964). The reasons for this state of affairs would lead us into detailed con-sideration of the history of ideas in linguistics, and cannot be considered here (a fully referenced discussion can be found in Crystal 1974); but, briefly, what seems to have happened is the following. Trager's influen-tial characterization (1958) of Paralanguage was a part of his overall descriptive framework, and the term received its definition and status from its relationships with other categories of the theory, in particular from the view that only phonemic and morphemic analysis was the domain of linguistics proper. As soon as alternative accounts of linguis-tic structure developed, in the mid-sixties, the status of Paralanguage inevitably became unclear. Fields such as psychotherapy, anthropology, and language teaching took over and developed many of the DESCRIP-TIVE insights of the approach, and found the notations and ad hoc classifications of great value.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Social Skills

  Developing Effective Interpersonal Communication

  • Alex Kelly(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  So what skills are involved in conversations? There are eight verbal behaviours that are important within a conversation: listening, opening a conversation, maintaining the conversation through taking turns, asking questions, answering questions, being relevant, repairing, and ending a conversation. But before we focus on listening, we will consider the nonverbal elements of the words: paralinguistic skills, because the two areas are interlinked. As a listener, we must focus on listening to the person in the truest sense. This means we should not just listen to the words being spoken, but to the true meaning and the feelings behind them, and we do this by listening to the Paralanguage.

  Paralinguistic skills or prosody

  Paralinguistic literally means ‘beyond words’ (from the Greek word ‘para’ which means beside or beyond) but they are also known as ‘vocal cues’ or ‘prosody’ or ‘the way we talk’. It is commonly referred to as ‘that which is left after subtracting the verbal content from speech’ (Hargie et al., 1994). Paralinguistic skills are therefore nonverbal behaviours as they are not to do with the verbal content of the message but the feeling behind it, therefore they are best described here in this chapter as they affect the conversation very directly.

  In a conversation, the listener hears far more than the speaker’s words. They listen to the pitch, the rate of speech, the volume, clarity and fluency. Prosody will help us to know which words are the important ones to listen to and ‘are there to direct us to the words that matter most’ (Boyce, 2012). These cues give words their meaning and they will tune us into the message behind them, making up 38% of our communication according to Mehrabian’s research (1971) which we discussed in Chapter 2 .

  That is why when we meet someone for the first time, we often don’t remember their name or the details of what they said, because we are concentrating on ‘listening’ to the essential aspects of their nonverbal communication: their body language and the way they talk. It is this that tells us: this person is trustworthy or funny, arrogant or stressed. The psychotherapist Rollo May (1969) said ‘I love to feel where words come from’ and also that when someone enters his consulting room he asks himself, ‘what does the voice say when I stop listening to the words and listen only to the tone?’

  There are three levels to prosodic function according to Attwood (2016): grammatical, pragmatic and affective. The grammatical function is to communicate aspects such as a question (with a rising pitch), or a statement (with a falling pitch), or whether a word was intended as a noun or a verb. The pragmatic function is to provide social information to the listener such as our opinion, our thoughts or to emphasise what we want to draw the listener’s attention to. The third function is the affective function which communicates feelings and attitudes. This tells the listener how we are feeling – are we happy and interested or anxious and needing reassurance – when we call out and say ‘come here’.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Organization of Behavior in Face-to-Face Interaction

  • Adam Kendon, Richard M. Harris, Mary R. Key, Adam Kendon, Richard M. Harris, Mary R. Key(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In this view, language is the representative, par excellence, of intellectual activity; Paralanguage, typically cast as emotive or expressive communication, somehow stands OUTSIDE cognition. We suggested earlier and will here attempt to show that a more balanced (and more accurate) view would see the coding of the Paralanguage, Communication, and Cognition 269 IDEATIONAL and AFFECTIVE-EVALUATIVE dimensions of experience as two aspects of cognition — integrated, rather than polarized as competitors for scholarly attention. A practice made fashionable by the generative tradition in linguistics is to ask What does a speaker-hearer know when he knows his language? By such a query it is meant to reveal that language is a manifestation of the distinctive features of human cognition. By reasonable extrapolation, we may apply the same question to Paralanguage . In both cases, we are concerned with forms of KNOWLEDGE : its acquisition and use. Cognition has to do with the NATURE OF KNOWING . Any growing human being whose behavior would be predictable is likely to learn Paralanguage as part of his psychosocial maturation. 8 In daily conversations, Paralanguage serves to make the audible behavior of interactants more intelligible to one another. In the hearing we give to most spoken utterances, we tend to allocate most of our conscious attention to the message-import of words, while RESPONDING TO other voiced informational cues that reach us subconsciously, awakening new and different understandings. Everyone in command of the voice system of his language has this intuitive skill. Part of our knowledge of our Paralanguage involves knowing what selective voice style variants may be appropriately used WITH WHOM, IN WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES, TO WHAT PURPOSE, WITH WHAT EFFECT, and WITH WHAT VERBAL AND KiNESic STRUCTURES .

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  InterGrammar

  Toward an Integrative Model of Verbal, Prosodic and Kinesic Choices in Speech

  • Horst Arndt, Richard W. Janney(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The objects of study in this field are sound effects continuing over longer utterance stretches (minimally, a syllable) or requiring reference to several verbal seg-ments in different parts of an utterance (cf. Crystal 1979: 33). The term prosody generally refers to phenomena of the former type: vocal modulations of the articulatory line caused by shifts in pitch contour, loudness, rhythm, pause patterns, stress, accent, phrasing and so on (cf. Crystal & Davy 1969: 104 ff.; Gumperz 1982: 100). Sapir (1927a) referred to these phenomena collectively as voice dynamics', Trager (1958) called them vocal qualifiers. The term Paralanguage is often used in connection with phenomena of the latter type: sounds or aspects of sounds which cannot be related in any direct or obvious way with specific verbal features of the articulatory line (cf. Trager 6.1 Prosody 227 1958; Birdwhistell 1961; Abercrombie 1968). For Sapir (1927a) these phenomena determined voice quality, ; Trager (1958) referred to them as vocal characterizers. Paralanguage, heralded at its inception (cf. Trager 1958) as a revolutionary new concept, has probably done more to confuse communication theory and hinder systematic integrative research on verbal, vocal, and kinesic patterning in speech than any other modern notion. In everyday practice, it is a sort of rag-bag category, in its implications not unlike the notion of performance in transformational-generative linguistics (cf. Halliday 1978: 38), into which all vocal and kinesic behavior which cannot be related explicitly to linguistic phenomena is put for lack of a more adequate term. For mainstream linguists, the study of Paralanguage has the same dubious connotations as the study of parapsychology has for mainstream psychologists. As a distinction in nonsegmental phonology, the pros-ody-Paralanguage dichotomy is purely conceptual, and should be recognized as such.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Listening to Spoken English

  • Gillian Brown(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Paralinguistic features

  Paralinguistic features of speech are those which contribute to the expression of attitude by a speaker. They are phonetic features of speech which do not form an intrinsic part of the phonological contrasts which make up the verbal message: they can be discussed independently of the sequences of vowels and consonants, of the stress patterns of words, of the stressing of lexical rather than grammatical words, and of intonation structure which determines where the tonic syllable falls. Hitherto the features of speech which we have discussed have been features which contribute directly to the interpretation of the verbal content of the message and its organization by the speaker in terms of information structure. Now we turn to consider those aspects of speech which contribute to a meaning over and above what the verbal element of the message means. Following a well-established distinction, we shall call the meaning contributed by the verbal content the 'conceptual' meaning of the utterance, and the meaning contributed by the paralinguistic features the 'affective' meaning of the utterance, where the feelings and attitudes of the speaker are to some extent revealed to the listener. (For a fuller discussion of this distinction, see Leech, 1974.)

  The paralinguistic features of speech are not, of course, isolated from other modes which are available to the speaker by which a particular attitude can be indicated towards the person being addressed or towards what is being spoken of. They relate closely to the phenomenon often referred to as 'body talk' or 'body language'—which refers to gesture, posture, facial expression and so on, all of which may have an effect on the way the listener interprets what the speaker says. If the speaker says 'That's very interesting' leaning forward with a bright alert look, the listener is likely to think that this is really what the speaker means, whereas if the speaker utters the same words but twisting to look out of the window and stifling a yawn, the listener might reasonably conclude that the speaker is not actually very interested. The body language of the speaker forms part of the wider context of utterance in which what is said is interpreted. I shall concentrate on the paralinguistic features of speech, rather than include a general discussion of these features within the wider setting of body language in general, because these are features which we listen to, and which we can hear over the radio, telephone or tape recorder—they fall squarely within the province of a discussion of 'listening' to spoken English. In our everyday experience of language it is usually the case that the paralinguistic vocal features will reinforce the content of what the speaker says. Thus our unmarked, neutral expectation will be that someone who says 'What a lovely day' will say it enthusiastically, that someone who says 'I am sorry' will say it sincerely, and that someone who says 'And now get out of here' will say it angrily. It is relatively rare, but by no means uncommon, to encounter a mismatch between the verbal content of the utterance and the way it is said—it is on such occasions that expressions like 'It's not so much what he said as the way he said it that upset/struck/ infuriated me' are appropriately used. Where such a mismatch occurs, listeners tend to pay more attention to the way something is said than to the verbal content. Lyons (1972) writes of this phenomenon in the following terms:

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Optimization of natural communication systems

  • Olga Akhmanova(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Rensky is even more ex- 20 plicit. He drops the smaller divisions and lists under language proper intonation, grammar, interjections, lexis; under para-language - paraprosody and paralexis (vocalisations). Even a brief and superficial comparison of the three models shows what the difficulty is when the speech event is visualized in its natural complexity, i.e., when it is viewed as it really is. When a given speech act is considered by the psychologist, the sociologist, the anthropologist, etc. , language is regarded as only a part of the total communication phenomenon - a part, one of the parts. Thus from the psychologist's point of view it is the states of the speaker's organism, his emotions, the nature of the particular motivation, his intentions, etc., that are most important or primary. To the linguist it is the constant and inter-personal, and not the peculiar and specific variables of the in-dividual speech-act that really matters. Although the linguist sees no reason why the term Paralanguage should not be used to label a number of peripheral phenomena of sound, he can find it hard to see how properly linguistic phonological methods can be applied here. True, the idea that the study of various express-ive components of speech must be based on grading, and not opposition, which requires the units under investigation to be discrete, does suggest ways of including the seemingly over-context-bound, or those which do not lend themselves to separ-ation from the particular states of a particular speaker in a par-ticular speech situation as parts of linguistics proper. But even so he will refuse point-blank to regard vocal character-izers as having anything to do with his subject. Even those phenomena of sound which are usually grouped under the gen-eral name of intonation are to a considerable extent supplemen-tary or even redundant. This is easily proved by listening to the endless variety of Englishes everybody can hear over the radio every day.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Speech Recognition

  • France Mihelic, Janez Zibert, France Mihelic, Janez Zibert(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • IntechOpen

    (Publisher)

  The understanding of paralinguistic information becomes as important as linguistic information in spoken dialogue systems, especially in interjections such as “eh”, “ah”, and “un”. Such interjections are frequently used to express a reaction to the conversation partner in a dialogue scenario in Japanese, conveying some information about the speaker’s intention, attitude, or emotion. As there is little phonetic information represented by such interjections, most of the paralinguistic information is thought to be conveyed by its speaking style, which can be described by variations in prosodic features, including voice quality features. So far, most previous research dealing with paralinguistic information extraction has focused only on intonation-related prosodic features, using fundamental frequency (F0), power and duration (e.g., Fujie et al., 2003; Hayashi, 1999). Others also consider segmental features like cepstral coefficients (e.g., Schuller et al., 2005; Nwe et al., 2003). However, Speech Recognition, Technologies and Applications 378 analyses of natural conversational speech have shown the importance of several voice quality features caused by non-modal phonations (e.g., Klasmeyer et al., 2000; Kasuya et al., 2000; Gobl et al., 2003; Campbell et al., 2003; Fujimoto et al., 2003; Erickson, 2005). The term “voice quality” can be used in a broad sense, as the characteristic auditory colouring of an individual speaker’s voice, including qualities such as nasalized, dentalized, and velarized, as well as those brought about by changing the vocal tract length or hypopharyngeal area (e.g., Imagawa et al., 2003; Kitamura et al., 2005; Dang et al., 1996). Here, we use it in a narrow sense of the quality deriving solely from laryngeal activity, i.e., from different vibration modes of the vocal folds (different phonation types), such as breathy, whispery, creaky and harsh voices (Laver, 1980).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Modelling Paralanguage Using Systemic Functional Semiotics

  Theory and Application

  • Thu Ngo, Susan Hood, J. R. Martin, Clare Painter, Bradley A. Smith, Michele Zappavigna(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  5 Interpersonal Paralanguage: Approaching Paralanguage from the perspective of social relations

  5.1   Introduction

  This chapter focuses on interpersonal meaning in Paralanguage – on the ways in which the Paralanguage of facial expression, voice quality, body gestures and positioning express feelings and enact social relations in cooperation with spoken language. The data are drawn from an award-winning stop-motion puppet animation film Coraline , directed by Henry Selick (2009) and based on a novella of the same name written by Neil Gaiman (2002) .

  Analyses explore the paralinguistic systems of interpersonal sonovergence in which movements of parts of the body or face rise and fall in tune with the intonation contours of the prosodic phonology (see Section 5.2) and interpersonal semovergence in which paralinguistic expressions converge with interpersonal meanings in spoken discourse (see Section 5.3). In the latter the relevant interpersonal discourse semantic system is appraisal with its three subsystems of attitude (as affect only in this case), engagement and graduation (Martin and White, 2005 ; Martin and Rose, [2003] 2007 ; Martin, 2017a ). Reviews of these discourse semantic systems precede introductions to related paralinguistic systems – paralinguistic affect , paralinguistic engagement and paralinguistic graduation . Systems of body orientation , proximity and power are also briefly discussed. System choices are illustrated in instances from Coraline and discussion focuses on intermodal convergences in expressions of emotion and the enactment of inter-character relations.

  The story depicts the return adventure of the central character, Coraline, a pre-teenage girl who moves from the real world into a mirror (other) world through a tiny passageway behind a locked door in an empty room in the house her family has just moved into. Having been ignored by her busy parents and bored in the real world, Coraline finds herself the centre of attention from an ‘Other Mother’ and an ‘Other Father’ in the alternate world. However, she soon comes to realize that she has in fact been trapped by a sinister villain, Beldam, appearing in the disguise of Other Mother with the intention of capturing the souls of children. The clever and brave Coraline is eventually able to save herself as well as her real parents and the souls of three other trapped children. She returns to her real world with a greater appreciation of her real parents.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Socialization and Communication in Primary Groups

  • Thomas R. Williams(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The segmental phonemes were the least important compo-nents of the study. 2. Suprasegmental Phonemes The suprasegmental phonemes are com-monly referred to as intonation. They include the phenomena of stress, pitch, and juncture. The Trager/Smith scheme for transcribing supraseg-mental phonemes was used, with minor modifications identical to those described in previous studies by this writer (Duncan and Rosenthal 1968; Duncan, Rosenberg, and Finkelstein 1969). Paralanguage Paralanguage refers to the wide variety of vocal behav-iors which occur in speech but which are not part of the sound system of language, as traditionally conceived. Comprehensive catalogs of paralin-guistic behaviors have been compiled by Trager (1958), Crystal and Quirk (1964), and Crystal (1969). Any one speaker will probably use only a small fraction of the total behaviors available. The following list, which uses Trager's (1958) terminology, includes only those behaviors which play a part in the turn system: (a) intensity (overloud — oversoft); (b) pitch height (overhigh — overlow); and (c) extent (drawl — clipping of individual syllables). The terms in parentheses define the anchor point for each behavioral continuum. A wide variety of paralinguistic behav-iors was actually encountered in the two dyads and included in the trans-criptions. BODY MOTION In contrast to Paralanguage, there was for body motion no 2 8 8 STARKEY D. DUNCAN, JR. available transcription system which could be readily applied to our videotapes. This situation led to a transcribing method based on the behaviors actually found in each interview. The transcription system for the first interview was created by first making an inventory of the move-ments used by the two participants, and then assigning either arbitrary or descriptive labels to these movements. This system was then applied to the second interview, after expanding it to include new movements observed in the second interview.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book