ABSTRACT
Linguists working from the perspective of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and cognitive science regularly ask: how does language use create emotional responses in speakers and hearers? In this discussion, I posit that as humans evolved complex communicational structures, they concomitantly developed the capacity to create emotional response in themselves and others through the production of organized sounds, including language, music and signal systems. These sounds can effectively stimulate the seat in the brain of emotional response, the limbic system, since sound is the most basic of all sensory inputs to the brain. But humans fine-tune this ability to produce desired responses.
