Illocution, attitudes and prosody

Through the analysis of an audio-visual corpus of Brazilian Portuguese prosodic attitudes, this paper describes the effect of attitude category on the prosodic realization of sentences. Attitudes that directly address the propositional content of utterances, which in fact correspond to new illocutions, were found to induce more changes in the acoustic signal than do those used to manage the social relationship between speaker and addressee. This difference is also reflected in perception, with the social attitudes mostly perceived through visual cues, while the propositional ones tend to be based on audio cues.

• Affiliations: 1: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; 2: CNRS