Verbal, prosodic, and kinesic emotive contrasts in speech

Abstract The signaling of logical relations between, and emotive reactions to, subjects in face-to-face speech are complexly interrelated processes, making it sometimes difficult to fully distinguish what people say from how they say it. Emotive communication, an aspect of the latter (style, rhetoric, speech strategy), may be viewed, following Stankiewicz (1964), as the culturally learned, cognitively mediated use of nonpropositional signals to express feelings, manage impressions, and reach goals in speech. The paper introduces some pragmatically relevant American English verbal, vocal, and kinesic emotive contrasts, e.g., shifts of verbal explicitness, verbal value-ladenness, verbal intensity, vocal emphasis, intonation, gaze, facial expression, body posture and so on, and discusses their functions in speech as signals of (un)assertiveness, (non)affiliation, and (un)involvement. Methodological and theoretical questions raised by the nondiscrete, gradient, ‘more/less’ nature of emotive contrasts are discussed, and some conventional cross-modal emotive strategies in American English are explained. The paper is at once an introduction to basic problems in the study of emotive communication, and an invitation to a synthesis of cognitive and emotive standpoints in pragmatic research on face-to-face speech.