Traditionally, intonation, or the melody of speech, has been associated with the expression of the attitudes and intentions of the speaker, but little is known of whether sociopragmatic factors related to social politeness (such as power or social distance) or situational factors (such as physical distance or insistence) determine the choice of intonational contours.

An article recently published in Language and Speech by   Joan Borràs-Comes,   Raphèu Sichel-Bazin  and   Pilar Prieto  (ICREA), researchers of the   Prosodic Studies Group, of the   Department of Translation and Language Sciences  at UPF, focuses on the conditions that make the speaker choose a certain intonational contour for vocatives.

The results of the study show that the melody of speech is a strong indicator of the expression of politeness and social relationships.

As the authors of the study state, "We Catalan speakers have three possible intonational melodies or contours to call someone". "The work we have published uses to experiments to research the conditions of adaptation that make speakers choose one of the three possible melodies for vocatives", they add.

The first experiment consisted of a production task in which 20 speakers of Catalan produced 320 vocative contours after being placed in different communicative contexts with varying characteristics of social politeness.

The second experiment consisted of a task of acceptability judgements in which 72 listeners were asked to evaluate the adaptation between an intonational contour and a previous discursive context (3,456 responses). 

The results of the two experiments show that both situational factors and those related to social politeness affect the choice of the intonation of vocatives. Finally, the results are discussed in the context of politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson, in the sense that the three intonational contours can be linked to nega tive, positive and direct politeness strategies (bald on-record).

Work of reference:

Joan Borràs-Comes, Rafèu Sichel-Bazin,  Pilar Prieto (2015) ,  "    Vocative Intonation Preferences are Sensitive to Politeness Factors ",  Language and Speech, 2015, Vol. 58(1) 68-83.