How does fundamental frequency correlate with perceived politeness in greetings ? Isabelle DUMAS,Emmanuel FERRAGNE

The purpose of this paper is to consider the contribution of prosody to discourse analysis in interaction by means of a concrete example, i.e., the analysis of bonjour, a French greeting. In this experiment, naïve subjects were made to listen to a series of French politeness formulae taken from real interactions and asked to evaluate the degree of politeness they perceived. Two hypotheses were tested : we first tried to determine whether the scores of the greetings recorded during commercial encounters were significantly different from those ascribed to greetings extracted from service encounters ; then, leaving aside this dichotomy, we concentrated on a hypothetical correlation between perceived politeness and the F0 glissando size (in semitones) on the second syllable of bonjour.