Expressing Surprise in Chinese Talk-in-lnteraction:An Empirical Analysis Based on Prosody and Gestures
Previous linguistic research has focused on textual markers to study surprise,which has not only promoted the separation of surprise from evidentiality into an independent grammatical category but also laid a solid foundation for the study of its syntactic and semantic features.However,in real conversations,textual markers are often absent and partici-pants rely on prosody and gestures to express and understand surprise.In light of this,this paper,based on the theory of in-teractional linguistics,adopts a multimodal perspective to explore how speakers express their surprise through prosody and gestures in real communication when not using explicit surprise textual markers.The findings are as follows.(1)Expressing surprise through prosody involves specific pitch,intensity,and duration values.At least one noticeable intonation pattern is used,and the syllables carrying surprise information are stressed and prolonged.(2)Five ways are discovered to express sur-prise through gestures:facial expressions,facial expressions accompanied by inhalation,facial expressions accompanied by hand movements,facial expressions accompanied by leaning forward/backward,and facial expressions accompanied by turn-ing head to look at source of surprise.(3)The most common way is the coordination of prosody and gestures,with two main patterns:prosody following gestures and overlapping with the latter,and prosody almost being simultaneous with gestures.This multimodal research contributes to the study of semantics and provides insights for multimodal emotion recognition.
Chinese talk-in-interactionexpressing surpriseprosodygestures
万方数据
维普
