Perception of emotional interjections and indexicality in language

• A special case of non-arbitrariness in language is emotional prosody, which is present in interjections. The non-arbitrary relation between prosodic expression and meaning of emotional interjections is mainly indexical; the emotional prosodic expression is caused by a bodily or mental process, i. e there is a spatio-temporal, or even causal, relation between content and expression. What the content, or meaning, of emotions is, has been subject to a long debate (cf. Cornelius, 2002) and will be discussed. Some interjections are more unstructured than others, "wild forms", while some are more conventionalized. It is plausible that conventionalized emotional prosody is encoded in individual lexical representations for interjections (cf. Nygaard & Queen, 2008). Interjections with mismatching emotional prosody are recognized more slowly when the interjections are ambiguous and have a low lexical content (Abelin, submitted) and thus lexical representation needs to include emotional prosodic representation. Emotional prosody of interjections becomes coded in interjections through listeners' experiences. Therefore there are indexical elements in language specific lexical representations of interjections. There could also be iconic relations between prosody and meaning, e.g. between F0 rise and fall and positive and negative metaphors. There are crossmodal connections between the auditive and visual senses, which will be studied experimentally. A priming experiment was performed were written and spoken words with emotional meanings of different kinds, e.g. jättebra (very good), tråkigt (boring), äckligt (disgusting) were tested. The question was whether emotional prosody influences visual lexical decisions in a cross-modal priming task: do prime words spoken with different emotional prosody influence lexical decisions to visually presented words with matching or mismatching meanings (cf. Schirmer, Kotz and Friederici, 2002)? If emotional prosody does influence visual lexical decision, this could indicate that emotional prosody is coded in the lexical representation of the emotionally coloured words.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

interjection

emotion

indexicality

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)