Establishing Relationship between Emotional Prosody and Affective Pragmatics

Abstract

This work aims to provide theoretical grounds to establish a relationship between emotional prosody and affective pragmatics. Affective pragmatics is a significant yet least studied area of research. This theoretical framework focuses how emotional expressions are constructive in channelizing the pragmatic meaning under the umbrella of affective pragmatics and also encompasses the speech engineering that conveys unabridged abstract emotions in the phenomenal process of emotion recognition. Since speech act theory focuses meaning at utterance level and not at emotional level, thus, there is a need to reflect on emotional expressions that function as paralinguistic features. There are several studies carried out on identification of emotions using prosodic modeling; however, there is no meticulous study that shows relationship between emotions and their pragmatic meanings. The current study will be an application of Theory of Affective Pragmatics (TAP) proposed by Andrea Scarantino in 2017, a theory analogous to speech act theory. The objectives of the study can be achieved through analysis of quantitative data procured taking advantage of the emotional recordings from Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts (EPST), a worldwide database used in emotion recognition processes, along with employment of appropriate prosodic features using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), a popular emotion recognition statistical model. The outcomes of this study will contribute to benefit new researchers in the field of linguistics to understand affective pragmatics at a profound level as a novel area of research.