Richard W. Janney

Toward a pragmatics of emotive communication

Abstract The task of developing a unified pragmatics of emotive communication poses many interesting challenges for future research. This paper outlines some areas in which more work could be done to help coordinate present linguistic research. After briefly reviewing some pioneering historical work on language and affect, the paper discusses the following concepts, all of which seem to be in need of further clarification: ‘emotive meaning’, ‘involvement’, ‘emotive markedness’, ‘degree of emotive divergence’, ‘objects of emotive choice’, ‘ loci of emotive choice’, and ‘outer vs. inner deixis’. Competing categories of emotive devices in current studies of language and affect are reviewed, and a simplified framework is proposed, consisting of: (1) evaluation devices, (2) proximity devices, (3) specificity devices, (4) evidentiality devices, (5) volitionality devices, and (6) quantity devices. It is argued that only with consensual categories and objects of analysis can investigators start focusing on, and comparing findings about, emotive linguistic phenomena from a unified point of view. Finally, some distinctions between potential perspectives, units, and loci of emotive analysis are proposed, and the paper concludes with a call for increased discussion of how research on language and affect might be better coordinated in the future.

Universality and relativity in cross-cultural politeness research: A historical perspective

In this paper the notion of universals of politeness is discussed against the background of the historical conflict between proponents of universality and relativity hypotheses in Western linguistics since at least the eighteenth century.

Verbal, prosodic, and kinesic emotive contrasts in speech

Abstract The signaling of logical relations between, and emotive reactions to, subjects in face-to-face speech are complexly interrelated processes, making it sometimes difficult to fully distinguish what people say from how they say it. Emotive communication, an aspect of the latter (style, rhetoric, speech strategy), may be viewed, following Stankiewicz (1964), as the culturally learned, cognitively mediated use of nonpropositional signals to express feelings, manage impressions, and reach goals in speech. The paper introduces some pragmatically relevant American English verbal, vocal, and kinesic emotive contrasts, e.g., shifts of verbal explicitness, verbal value-ladenness, verbal intensity, vocal emphasis, intonation, gaze, facial expression, body posture and so on, and discusses their functions in speech as signals of (un)assertiveness, (non)affiliation, and (un)involvement. Methodological and theoretical questions raised by the nondiscrete, gradient, ‘more/less’ nature of emotive contrasts are discussed, and some conventional cross-modal emotive strategies in American English are explained. The paper is at once an introduction to basic problems in the study of emotive communication, and an invitation to a synthesis of cognitive and emotive standpoints in pragmatic research on face-to-face speech.