ABSTRACT

Paralinguistic features of speech are those which contribute to the expression of attitude by a speaker. They are phonetic features of speech which do not form an intrinsic part of the phonological con­ trasts which make up the verbal message: they can be discussed independendy of the sequences of vowels and consonants, of the stress patterns of words, of the stressing of lexical rather than gram­ matical words, and of intonation structure which determines where the tonic syllable falls. Hitherto the features of speech which we have discussed have been features which contribute directly to the inter­ pretation of the verbal content of the message and its organization by the speaker in terms of information structure. Now we turn to consider those aspects of speech which contribute to a meaning over and above what the verbal element of the message means. Following a well-established distinction, we shall call the meaning contributed by the verbal content the ‘conceptual’ meaning of the utterance, and the meaning contributed by the paralinguistic features the ‘affective’ meaning of the utterance, where the feelings and attitudes of the speaker are to some extent revealed to the listener. (For a fuller dis­ cussion of this distinction, see Leech, 1974.)

The paralinguistic features of speech are not, of course, isolated from other modes which are available to the speaker by which a par­ ticular attitude can be indicated towards the person being addressed or towards what is being spoken of. They relate closely to the phenomenon often referred to as ‘body talk’ or ‘body language’—which refers to gesture, posture, facial expression and so on, all of which may have an effect on the way the listener interprets what the speaker says. If the speaker says ‘That’s very interesting’ leaning forward with a bright alert look, the listener is likely to think that this is really what the speaker means, whereas if the speaker utters the same words but twisting to look out of the window and stifling a yawn, the listener might reasonably conclude that the speaker is not actually very inter­ ested. The body language of the speaker forms part of the wider context of utterance in which what is said is interpreted. I shall con­

centrate on the paralinguistic features of speech, rather than include a general discussion of these features within the wider setting of body language in general, because these are features which we listen to, and which we can hear over the radio, telephone or tape recorder-they fall squarely within the province of a discussion of ‘listening’ to spoken English. In our everyday experience of language it is usually the case that the paralinguistic vocal features will reinforce the con­ tent of what the speaker says. Thus our unmarked, neutral expectation will be that someone who says ‘What a lovely day’ will say it enthusiastically, that someone who says ‘I am sorry’ will say it sincerely, and that someone who says ‘And now get out of here’ will say it angrily. It is relatively rare, but by no means uncommon, to encounter a mismatch between the verbal content of the utterance and the way it is said-it is on such occasions that expressions like ‘It’s not so much what he said as the way he said it that upset/strucl^/ infuriated me’ are appropriately used. Where such a mismatch oc­ curs, listeners tend to pay more attention to the way something is said than to the verbal content. Lyons (1972) writes of this phenomenon in the following terms:

It seems to be the case that, whenever there is a contradiction between the overt form of a verbal utterance and the associated prosodic and paralinguistic features it is the latter which deter­ mine the semiotic classification of the utterance.