Pitch range, gestural information and perceived politeness in Catalan

It is known that certain prosodic aspects of speech play a role in the expression of paralinguistic meaning, yet the concrete mechanisms of how this is implemented have not yet been fleshed out. The present article attempts to explore the contribution of pitch range to the expression of politeness in information-seeking yes–no questions in Catalan. Two perception experiments were carried out with stimuli that contained a gradual increase and decrease of the pitch range at the end of two target intonation contours (rising and falling). The results of the first experiment revealed that, for both contours, increasing the pitch range of the final part of the utterance tone resulted in a decrease of perceived politeness, whereas decreasing the pitch range had no effect. The second perception experiment showed that adding contextual (gestural) information reversed the tendency. Taken together, these results point to the complex interaction between prosodic cues and contextual information (specifically, facial gestures). There is nothing intrinsically polite about using an increased pitch range, unless it is accompanied by consistent contextual information. In sum, when assessing the degree of perceived politeness of an utterance, attention has to be paid to various prosodic aspects together with contextual and gestural information.Parts of this study were presented at the first Cat_ToBI workshop (Barcelona, July 2009). We are grateful to the audience at this workshop, and especially to Eulàlia Bonet, Teresa Cabré, Verònica Crespo, José Ignacio Hualde, Joan C. Mora, Maria del Mar Vanrell, and Anne Wichmann for very useful feedback. We would like to thank the participants in the two experiments, Verònica Crespo for her help running the experiments, Joan C. Mora for his support with the use of DmDx, Romà Rofes for technical support, and Maria del Mar Vanrell for her help with the statistical analysis of the data. This research has been funded by projects FFI2009-07648/FILO and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 Programme CSD2007-00012 (both awarded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación) and by project 2009 SGR 701 (awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya)