SOME PHONETIC NOTES ON EMOTION: LAUGHTER, INTERJECTIONS, AND WEEPING

As consultant for the movie My Fair Lady, Peter Ladefoged must have found it a daunting task to resuscitate the phonetics of the early 20 th century. The task in the present situation is just the opposite. We now have an extensive armory of equipment and methods; but the “primitive“, marginal, and elusive element in the project is the subject matter itself: the phonetics of emotional expressions such as laughter, interjections, and weeping. All three of these areas have been marginalized and neglected in research in the scientific disciplines dealing with the communicative use of human language.