Exploring Prosodic Pragmatics at Affective Level

Abstract

This research work presents a conceptual framework to explore the interplay between intonation and emotional expressions that conveys pragmatic meaning of linguistic utterances. Theory of Affective Pragmatics (TAP), an innovative theory that functions parallel to speech act theory, is applied to introduce a conceptual framework to study prosodic pragmatics at a profound level. The affective component of attitude is introduced in the framework using Ostrom’s ABC model to comprehend affective pragmatics. For further study on this framework, quantitative research design is desirable to analyze data and the data is suggested to be obtained through emotional recordings from emotional prosody speech and transcripts (EPST). Praat as an apt tool recommended for the prosodic analysis of the data. This framework explains how intonation patterns signal unabridged emotions and feelings to understand speaker’s implied meaning. It elaborates the emotional expressions that convey pragmatic meaning to intellectualize affective pragmatics. It highlights some other facets that render affective pragmatics a new-fangled field of research. It has also been envisioned to broaden the scope of prosodic pragmatics as a distinctive research domain in linguistics. The framework is an application of TAP and provides grounds to researchers to understand prosodic pragmatics at a deeper level and to perform future researches in more effective ways. The research is unique in its essence as it offers a conceptual framework to explore affective component of attitude in prosodic pragmatics that has not yet been explored.