English and Persian Context-Bound Interpretation of Expressive Subtle Attitudes through Contrastive Pitch Range Pattern

Prosodic cues are useful in detecting particular elements of conversational style and social intention of the speaker in a daily conversation. This article focuses on investigating the effectiveness of these prosodic aspects to identify different attitudes and to explore how FO with other acoustic and temporal features is involved in the expression of feelings. As reference for each language, Searle’s classification of illocutionary force and Pierrehumbert’s auto-segmental –metrical theory were followed. A group of 40 random-chosen undergraduate male and female students from Ahvaz Azad University were involved in the study. As an instrument, two versions of a closed-ended questionnaire were used to elicit data. To reveal significant differences between two languages regarding expressive speech act through different intonation patterns, a Chi-square test and a Paired-sample t-test were conducted to analyze the data and to reveal whether there is any significant difference between patterns of the two languages. The data analysis showed that the subjects did not have enough knowledge about direct and indirect strategies of the target language while expressing expressive attitudes. Finally, the findings indicated that a description of attitudinal states may benefit from incorporation of prosody as well as context of are effective elements in the speech encoding process. Providing English foreign language learners with socio-cultural norms, pragmatic knowledge and input with specific feedback through various intonational patterns improve their communicative competence while expressing and interpreting emotions and attitudes in English as the target language.