A Pragmatic Analysis Of Paralinguistic Strategies In Spoken English

In a broad sense, a complete communication is made up by verbal and non-verbal communication. In a narrow sense, that is a combination of "what is said" and "how it is said". "What is said" is concerned with linguistic behavior while "how it is said" can be referred to the joint effect of tones of voice. However, a large quantity of literature reveals that for a long time "how it is said" has been subjected to bad neglect in contrast to the importance attached to "what is said". The proposition of the term "paralanguage" to explain those tones of voice mainly including voice qualities, voice sets and vocalizations in 1950s rose people's awareness of its presence and its importance in communication. Since then, various interdisciplinary studies about paralanguage develop with vigor and enthusiasm.Prevailing researches on paralanguage relate closely to its importance in interdisciplinary fields. In the field of linguistics, on the one hand, language definitely cannot be independent of the use of paralanguage due to language's transmission through sound. People make use of language to exchange thoughts and pass on messages, which relies on the support and aid of paralanguage. On the other hand, paralanguage is an essential way to express emotions and attitudes. The rhythmic tones in paralanguage reflect greatly the emotional information conveyed by a speaker. Therefore it also becomes an important tool for emotional exchange.The universal existence of paralanguage makes most of researchers try to get a general understanding of paralanguage through contrastive researches from the intercultural perspective. However, it turns out that they still do not achieve an adequate understanding of the application and interpretation of paralanguage in language. The innovation of this thesis lies in three aspects. Firstly, this paper examines paralanguage from a totally new perspective. Although paralanguage is an interdisciplinary field, intercultural perspective is a common way for its general study. In order to focus on those useful paralinguistic strategies intentionally used in spoken English, a pragmatic approach is applied to this study by making use of its three important theories, namely, pragmatic context, speech act theory and Gricean theory of conversational implicature. From this new angle, this paper aims to explore the paralanguage in an objective and detailed way. Secondly, it is the study data employed in this paper. All the data used in this paper come from two corpora of spoken English, which comprise large amounts of authentic materials. These materials cover a wide range of fields from academic speech to telephone conversation, from face-to-face communication to monologues. In brief, both informal and formal materials in the corpora ensure the diversity of the collected data. Lastly, the research methodology also infuses new blood in this paper. Particularly, both qualitative and quantitative analyses are made to provide valid grounds for the arguments in the paper. Moreover, making advantage of speech analysis software PRAAT also increases the reliability of analytical results.Specifically speaking, spoken English is never lack of paralinguistic phenomena. When uttering spoken English, it is those various invisible prosodic features including varying degrees of stress, pause and pitch on which spoken English mainly depends to realize expressing goals and send emotional signals as well. Meanwhile, there are also a large number of vocal alternants that are mainly reflected in non-lexical words, and different forms of differentiators like laughing, yawning, throat-clearing and coughing decorating among English words. Therefore, in order to obtain a clear knowledge of paralinguistic messages, this paper discusses paralinguistic strategies in spoken English from these two aspects. Prosodic features that work through uttering words are one of these aspects. Among them, pitch, stress and length are mainly focused on in this paper. Another aspect of paralinguistic strategies are featured by their independent usage beyond English words. They include vocal alternants and differentiators in this paper. All of these phenomena not only provide helpful tools to express and interpret spoken English, but also to some extent add complexity and difficulties to the better comprehension of the language, especially for English learners.Paralinguistic phenomena in spoken English are usually featured by invisibility, vagueness and complexity but informativeness. In light of these features, to get better understanding of paralinguistic strategies needs to overcome their complexity and invisibility to obtain their informative meaning in spoken English. If a comprehensive theoretical frame is required to divide the complicated factors of paralinguistic strategies for analyses, a survey on previous studies on paralanguage suggests that paralanguage functions as emotional index in a conversation and shows speaking intentions, which are connected largely with context theory and speech act theory in pragmatics. Meanwhile, this paper tries to further figure out the relationship between paralinguistic strategies and intended meanings behind words under the Gricean theory of conversational implicature. Furthermore, to verify theoretical application to the analysis of paralinguistic features in spoken English, practical examples are necessary In this aspect, transcription of paralinguistic phenomena in spoken English in London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English is effective in solving the difficulty of invisibility of paralanguage. And Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English with the help of speech sound analysis software, PRAAT, and retrieving tool, XAIRA, provides detailed evidences in tracking the working of paralinguistic strategies in spoken English.In order to get the answer for this study, the study is carried out by five chapters. It starts with the chapter of a general description of this paper and introduction to the significance of this research. Reviewing literature for support of the study points follows in the next chapter. Data collection from corpora and data analysis with software tools are focused on in the third chapter. The fourth chapter deals with the results and discussion of collected paralinguistic data to figure out the effects of paralinguistic strategies in spoken English under the three pragmatic theories. In the last conclusion chapter, practical implications yielded from the findings of the study are drawn, and four ways to improve paralinguistic competence are proposed with the aim of enhancing linguistic competence of English and communicative skills. Eventually, it also points out the difficulties and barriers to realize a systematic and complete research on paralanguage.With the outline as indicated above, qualitative analysis mainly reflected in cases study and quantitative analysis in the form of test experiments, based on the paralinguistic data collections from London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English and Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, are made to explore those significant paralinguistic strategies in spoken English, for the purpose of addressing how the important effects the use of paralinguistic strategies make on setting up conversational context, identifying illocutionary forces in speech acts and generating conversational implicatures. In the process of data collection and analysis, examples with the four common emotional expressions and certain non-lexical words are selected out for context discussion. It is found that pitch, loudness and speed or their combination stand out as effective ways to provide emotional information behind language words while those non-lexical words that are used in an independent way can also offer useful context information beyond language words. When it comes to the discussion of paralinguistic strategies for identifying illocutionary forces, Searl's categorization of five kinds of illocutionary acts are chosen for data collection. The cases study of representatives and declaratives indicates that representatives mainly seen in public speech attach much importance to utilization of paralinguistic strategies but it is not the same case for declaratives due to the so-called "extralinguistic institutions". Directives, commissives and expressives are examined together by making use of both experimental study and case study. And it turns out that the shift among these three kinds can be realized when some factors of prosodic features make a change. Lastly, through the examination of the sub-corpus built based on London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English, it is shown that paralinguistic strategies can be usually employed for the violation of the four maxims of conversational principles and even for discovering conversational implicatures. With the findings of this study, practical significance of boosting English listening and further improving English communication skill can be drawn. But without exception, complexity of paralanguage and limitation of language materials in this paper to some extent hinder the exhaustive study on this topic and further research is still needed.