Effects of Tune and Interspeaker Differences on the Interpretation of Requests and Offers

Caterina Petrone (1) , Elisa Sneed German (2) , James Sneed German (1) , Kiwako Ito (3)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage
2 EMMA - Etudes montpelliéraines du monde anglophone
3 OSU - Ohio State University [Columbus]

A growing body of evidence reveals that tune meaning is multidimensional and flexible, with the choice of a tune depending both on linguistic and metalinguistic purposes. This study explores how perlocutionary meaning is influenced by tune for requests and offers. Two female speakers of American English produced 96 request-offer pairs in the form of polar questions with both rising and falling tunes. Using an online survey system, participants' ratings of speaker authority were elicited. Falling tunes raised speaker authority to a greater degree for requests than for offers. Speaker 2, who had generally larger f0 movements than Speaker 1, was rated as more authoritative. Hence, different intonational tunes are assessed along with their metalinguistic and social dimensions, with individual differences in tune implementation also modulating listeners' judgments.

Mots clés: rising/falling tunes; perlocutionary effects; online survey; request and offer

Domaines: Linguistique

Caterina Petrone, Elisa Sneed German, James Sneed German, Kiwako Ito. Effects of Tune and Interspeaker Differences on the Interpretation of Requests and Offers. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences ICPhS 2019, Aug 2019, Melbourne, Australia. ⟨hal-02110414⟩