Affective Effects as Key Theoretical Tools for Prosodic-Pragmatic Analysis
This seminar explores the theoretical and analytical potential of affective effects—as developed in Wharton & de Saussure’s Pragmatics and Emotion (2023)—as central tools for prosodic-pragmatic research. Challenging the long-standing division between “reason” and “emotion” in semantics and pragmatics, Wharton & de Saussure argue that emotional meaning is not peripheral, but constitutive of human communication. Their model integrates affective science with Relevance Theory, proposing that utterance interpretation relies not only on conceptual inferences, but also on patterns of affective activation that guide attention, shape contextual selection, and constrain inferential routes in systematic, measurable ways.
Building on this framework, the seminar shows how primary and secondary affective effects—anticipatory, transfer-based, and inferentially generated—provide new explanatory leverage for multimodal analysis. Prosodic, facial, and gestural cues operate as “natural codes” that trigger affective effects in real time, promoting fast, subcortical evaluation pathways while interacting with slower, propositional reasoning. This dual-route perspective helps to explain why certain prosodic contours, voice qualities, or facial configurations exert powerful pragmatic force even when their contribution is ineffable or impossible to paraphrase. The presenters will demonstrate how these affective mechanisms can be operationalised in multimodal transcription and in empirical studies of speech, drawing attention to the communicative work accomplished by cloud-like, non-propositional content.
The seminar will also present original data on simultaneous interpreting, drawing on a corpus on EU Parliament speeches, involving seven languages. Wharton & de Saussure’s “affective machinery” offers a predictive model of how emotion-laden source speech influences interpreter processing, output patterns, and audience uptake. The presenters will show how affective effects—activated through source-speech prosody, lexical choices, or embodied displays—shape interpreters’ anticipatory processing, segmentation decisions, mitigation or intensification strategies, and multimodal alignment with the speaker. Particular attention will be paid to the systematicity of these effects and to the extent to which they can be empirically traced through acoustic measures. Together, these threads argue for an expanded, affect-aware pragmatics which treats emotional meaning not as an optional add-on, but as a fundamental dimension of relevance. Through theoretical framing and data-driven illustration, the seminar positions affective effects as indispensable tools for the next generation of prosodic-pragmatic and multimodal research.
Relevance Researchers' Network 