English Emotional Signification in Pragmatic Communication.

ABSTRACT

The matching and mismatching of ‘linguistic emotion’ with ‘prosodic emotion’ and ‘facial emotion’ of an utterance is a challenging pragmatic communication behavior, and it affects interlocutors’ meanings, functions, and intentions. In linguistics, meanings, functions, and intentions of an utterance which are not primarily present in only semantic linguistic surface structure of an utterance are studied in semiotics and pragmatics. The change in meaning, function, and intention due to influence of facial expressions and prosodic emotions to an utterance linguistic content has been referred to as ‘Emotional signification’ in this thesis and is of high concern to both semiotics and pragmatics. In semiotics, anything which has meaning is regarded as a semiotic sign and it has a reference. The reference of a semiotic sign may change based on modification of a sign. The process of Emotional signification affects the reference of an utterance as a semiotic sign. When an utterance receives modifications that are associated with the main propositional contents such as prosodic emotional modification without linguistic modifications it changes its reference. In Pragmatics, an utterance may change meaning when it is affected by factors such as context, mental states, and neighboring speech or text. Although there is evidence from prosody studies about acoustic detectability of prosodic physiological features manifesting when the same utterance is spoken to indicate different attitude and intentions such as excitation, energy, duration, and loudness, there are still inadequate approaches to how emotional facial expressions, prosodic emotions, and linguistic content of an utterance cause emotional signification, especially given the inability of intonation analysis tools to detect multi-modal utterance intention rather than intonational intentions since emotions are not sounds and sounds are not emotions even though they can both be used to conditions different utterance meanings and intentions, and can both still be detected differently in acoustic analysis tools. For this reason, this thesis covers two aims, which are, first, laying down foundations to studying pragmatic meanings, functions, and intentions present in an interplay and mismatching of a face, voice, and utterance. Second, finding evidence supporting presence of pragmatic meanings, functions and intentions present in an interplay and mismatches of a face, voice, and an utterance in interlocution. Thus, to investigate the essence of changes in meanings, functions, and intentions due to emotional signification, two phonetics experiments have been applied. The first experiment was designed to find out acoustic differences in an English utterance when spoken in eight different emotional expressions and found mean amplitudes differences. With the aid of Praat speech analysis software, the ready constructed ten English utterances which were spoken by ten different speakers each in eight different emotional expressions were recorded for experiment analysis. It was then hypothesized that, since emotions as carriers of utterance meanings may not indicate measurable and acoustic detectable intention of an utterance unless there are theoretical explanations of how emotions of both facial expressions and prosody cause different types of utterances to have different meanings, functions, and intentions, there was therefore an additional utterance intention listener judgement experiment which used matched and mismatched emotional speech acts as responses to dialogues formulated by consulting explanations laid in the theoretical foundation part that not all types of sentence and or classes of Searle speech acts react similarly in terms of utterance function and intention when affected by emotional signification. The results of the first experiment confirm that one utterance when spoken with different emotion categories, such emotional manifestations are acoustically detectable.The second phonetic experiment was designed to determine whether different emotional categories of one speech/utterance presupposed to have specific functions and intentions could be physically comprehended by English listeners. In this experiment English listeners responded to multiple choice survey questions attached with English dialogues by selecting the speaker’s signified intention from four options from each dialogue. The results of the second experiment indicate that one speech act utterance when spoken with different emotional voices, its emotional manifestation is interpreted by English listeners as capable of carrying different intentions. However, there is no one to one relationship between emotion category and utterance intention in a signified emotional utterance. The differences happen because of the baseline emotional nature of an utterance, the nature of an utterance propositional content, and emotional category of a newer emotive force used in signifying an utterance. Therefore, this research has managed to describe an approach to understanding utterance meanings, functions, and intentions which are present in matches and mismatches of emotional facial expressions, voice emotions and utterance linguistic content during interlocution by focusing on the concept ‘emotional signification’ using two theoretical foundations which are, Emotional signification as a semiotic process, and emotional signification as a pragmatic act, and two research methods which are two phonetics experiments one linguistic survey about Utterance intention listener judgement. The evidence collected from results of the two experiments which are mean amplitudes of utterances emotion categories in experiment one and utterance emotional intentions in experiment two, support presence of acoustic differences in an utterance spoken in eight emotional expressions and human perceivable distinctive utterance emotional intentions in eight emotional expressions. Such evidence is conclusively presented to be aligning with accounts laid down as capable of carrying different meanings, functions, and intentions.

Key Words: Emotional signification, Pragmatic meaning, Semiotic process, Speech act, Pragmatic act.