Gender variability in the prosodic production of compliments in Italian: A pilot study

Abstract

The aim of this research is to examine the prosody of Italian compliments. Previous research on compliments has devoted minimal attention to the prosodic aspect of these expressions, and little attention has been addressed to the question of compliments in Italian. However, issues regarding intonation and duration seem to be of pivotal importance in the construction of compliments and in the differentiation of compliment responses.

To this end, a corpus of oral Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT) was analysed to describe a contextual situation in which speakers were required to offer a compliment. Eight Italian participants (4 men and 4 women) were asked to read the DCTs and provide an appropriate response to the given scenario. The comparisons were made between male and female participants, without considering cross-gender compliments. There were notable differences in the lexical and intonation preferences of the female and male participants. Acoustic analysis revealed evidence of gender-based differences in the prosody of compliments, specifically in terms of pitch range and duration. In particular, male participants showed a wider pitch range and longer stressed nuclear vowels than their female counterparts. These findings suggest a correlation between the prosodic strategies observed and the lexical choices present in the compliments. The data indicated that men used longer compliments with low lexical density and a greater number of implicit expressions, whereas women produced shorter compliments with a higher semantic density than those produced by their male counterparts. This was due to the higher incidence of intensifiers and positive words used by women. These features increased the number of high-pitched accents in the intonation contours of women's utterances, as well as the global pitch range, resulting in more expressive and affective compliments compared to those of men. This study broadens our understanding of Italian compliments by examining them from both lexical and prosodic perspectives. By addressing the lack of research on the prosody of compliments—particularly within the underexplored context of Italian discourse—it makes a valuable contribution to the field of pragmatics.