Pitch, Politeness and Sexual Role: An Exploratory Investigation into the Pitch Correlates of English and Japanese Politeness Formulae

Abstract

This paper reports a preliminary investigation into the pitch correlates of politeness formulae produced by Japanese and English informants of both sexes. Significant pitch differences in the expression of politeness occur between the two language communities: The Japanese female subjects adopt an extremely high pitch clearly separating themselves acoustically from Japanese males in the same circumstances, while English male pitch is considerably less differentiated from English female pitch. These pitch differences arise, it is suggested, because of a contrasting sociosemiotic function assigned to pitch in the two speech communities whereby Japanese high pitch is typically reserved for the enactment of female roles while English high pitch is adopted by both sexes to express politeness.