|
Paralanguage is a component of meta-communication that may modify or nuance meaning, or convey emotion, such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation etc. It is sometimes defined as relating to nonphonemic properties only. Paralanguage may be expressed consciously or unconsciously. The study of paralanguage is known as paralinguistics, and was invented by George L. Trager in the 1950s, while he was working at the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State. His colleagues at the time included Henry Lee Smith, Charles F. Hockett (working with him on using descriptive linguistics as a model for paralanguage), Edward T. Hall developing proxemics, and Ray Birdwhistell developing kinesics.〔Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (1990). Notes in the history of intercultural communication: The Foreign Service Institute and the mandate for intercultural training. ''Quarterly Journal of Speech,'' 76, 262-281.〕 Trager published his conclusions in 1958,〔Trager, G. L. (1958). Paralanguage: A first approximation. ''Studies in Linguistics'', 13, 1-12.〕 1960〔Trager, G. L. (1960). Taos III: Paralanguage. ''Anthropological Linguistics'', 2, 24-30.〕 and 1961.〔Trager, G. L. (1961). The typology of paralanguage. ''Anthropological Linguistics'', 3 (1), 17–21.〕 His work has served as a basis for all later research, especially those investigating the relationship between paralanguage and culture (since paralanguage is learned, it differs by language and culture). A good example is the work of John J. Gumperz on language and social identity, which specifically describes paralinguistic differences between participants in intercultural interactions.〔Gumperz, J. J. (1982). ''Discourse strategies''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.〕 The film Gumperz made for BBC in 1982, ''Multiracial Britain: Crosstalk'', does a particularly good job of demonstrating cultural differences in paralanguage, and the impact these have on relationships. Paralinguistic information, because it is phenomenal, belongs to the external speech signal (Ferdinand de Saussure's ''parole'') but not to the arbitrary conventional code of language (Saussure's ''langue''). The paralinguistic properties of speech play an important role in human communication. There are no utterances or speech signals that lack paralinguistic properties, since speech requires the presence of a voice that can be modulated. This voice must have ''some'' properties, and all the properties of a voice as such are paralinguistic. However, the distinction linguistic vs. paralinguistic applies not only to speech but to writing and sign language as well, and it is not bound to any sensory modality. Even vocal language has some paralinguistic as well as linguistic properties that can be ''seen'' (lip reading, McGurk effect), and even ''felt'', e.g. by the Tadoma method. ==Aspects of the speech signal== ;Perspectival aspects :Speech signals arrive at a listener’s ears with acoustic properties that may allow listeners to identify location of the speaker (sensing distance and direction, for example). Sound localization functions in a similar way also for non-speech sounds. The perspectival aspects of lip reading are more obvious and have more drastic effects when head turning is involved. ;Organic aspects :The speech organs of different speakers differ in size. As children grow up, their organs of speech become larger and there are differences between male and female adults. The differences concern not only size, but also proportions. They affect the pitch of the voice and to a substantial extent also the formant frequencies, which characterize the different speech sounds. The organic quality of speech has a communicative function in a restricted sense, since it is merely informative about the speaker. It will be expressed independently of the speaker’s intention. ;Expressive aspects :Paralinguistic cues such as loudness, rate, pitch, pitch contour, and to some extent formant frequencies of an utterance, contribute to the emotive or attitudinal quality of an utterance. Typically, attitudes are expressed intentionally and emotions without intention, but attempts to fake or to hide emotions are not unusual . Consequently, paralinguistic cues relating to expression have a moderate effect of semantic marking. That is, a message may be made more or less coherent by adjusting its expressive presentation. For instance, upon hearing an utterance such as "I drink a glass of wine every night before I go to sleep" is coherent when made by a speaker identified as an adult, but registers a small semantic anomaly when made by a speaker identified as a child.〔Van Berkum, J.J., Van den Brink, D., Tesink, C.M., Kos, M., & Hagoort, P. (2008). The neural integration of speaker and message. ''Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience'', 20, 580–591.〕 This anomaly is significant enough to be measured through electroencephalography, as an N400. Individuals with disorders along autism spectrum have a reduced sensitivity to this and similar effects.〔Groen, W.B., Tesink, C., Petersson, K.M., Van Berkum, J., Van der Gaag, R.J., Hagoort, P. and Buitelaar, J.K. (2010). Semantic, factual, and social language comprehension in adolescents with autism: an fMRI study. ''Cerebral Cortex'', 20(8), 1937-1945.〕 Emotional tone of voice, itself paralinguistic information, has been shown to affect the resolution of lexical ambiguity. Some words have homophonous partners; some of these homophones appear to have an implicit emotive quality, for instance the sad "die" contrasted with the neutral "dye"; uttering the sound /dai/ in a sad tone of voice can result in a listener writing that word significantly more often than if the word is uttered in a neutral tone.〔Nygaard, L.C., Lunders, E.R. (2002). Resolution of lexical ambiguity by emotional tone of voice. ''Memory & Cognition'', 30(4), 583-593〕 ;Linguistic aspects :Ordinary phonetic transcriptions of utterances reflect only the linguistically informative quality. The problem of how listeners factor out the linguistically informative quality from speech signals is a topic of current research. Some of the linguistic features of speech, in particular of its prosody, are paralinguistic or pre-linguistic in origin. A most fundamental and widespread phenomenon of this kind is described by John Ohala as the "frequency code".〔Ohala, J. J. (1984) An ethological perspective on common cross-language utilization of F0 of voice. ''Phonetica, 41'', 1-16.〕 This code works even in communication across species. It has its origin in the fact that the acoustic frequencies in the voice of small vocalizers are high while they are low in the voice of large vocalizers. This gives rise to secondary meanings such as 'harmless', 'submissive', 'unassertive', which are naturally associated with smallness, while meanings such as 'dangerous', 'dominant', and 'assertive' are associated with largeness. In most languages, the frequency code also serves the purpose of distinguishing questions from statements. It is universally reflected in expressive variation, and it is reasonable to assume that it has phylogenetically given rise to the sexual dimorphism that lies behind the large difference in pitch between average female and male adults. In text-only communication such as email, chatrooms and instant messaging, paralinguistic elements can be displayed by emoticons, font and color choices, capitalization and the use of non-alphabetic or abstract characters. Nonetheless, paralanguage in written communication is limited in comparison with face-to-face conversation, sometimes leading to misunderstandings. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Paralanguage」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|