On the fringes of grammar

The role of prosody in affective communication

Abstract

This article supports Wiltschko’s argument, extending her proposal to affective proso­dy. This is needed, since Wiltschko’s proposal neglects prosody as a mode of emotional expres­sion. Particularly, I analyze aspirations and vowel lengthening to show that their emotional interpretation is necessarily context-dependent, as they express diametrically opposed emotions in various linguistic contexts. Thus, as there is no correspondence between distributions and functions, they are expected to fall outside grammar. Moreover, the use of another prosodic cue—rising intonation—is also discussed to illustrate how it performs a grammatical function, as it encodes epistemic states, hence being different from emotional aspirations and vowel length.