The Attitudinal Effects of Prosody, and How They Relate to Emotion

The aim of this paper is to contribute to a theoretical framework for the study of affective intonation. I draw a distinction between 'attitude' and 'emotion', suggesting that only the latter is likely to be reflected directly in the speech signal, while 'attitude' is reflected indirectly, and can only be explained by a process of linguistic analysis. The term 'attitude', as applied to intonation and prosody, is a problematic one. It has been used differently in different fields, such as social psychology and linguistics, and is not made any clearer by the proliferation of 'attitudinal' labels in the intonation literature. I suggest that while there are clearly prosodic signals in speech which contribute to the impression of 'attitude', this perceived meaning should be treated as a pragmatic implicature or a pragmatic inference. This means that it can only be explained by taking into account contextual features, such as speaker-hearer relationship, and the text itself. The same intonational feature can be attitudinally neutral, or signal positive and negative attitudes depending on a complex interaction between prosody, text and context.