Editor

JLLT edited by Thomas Tinnefeld
Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 11 (2020) Issue 1, pp. 91-107




Methodological Proposals for Teaching
the Intonation of Politeness in Catalan


Marta Bartolí Rigol & Empar Devís Herraiz (both Barcelona, Spain)


Abstract (English)
The objective of this research was to discover the melodic features of mitigating politeness used by Catalan speakers with the aim of providing methodological resources to teachers of Catalan as a foreign language. The activities designed offer students the opportunity to practice the intonation of politeness so as to avoid conflicts caused by melodic misunderstandings. This paper outlines the results obtained from the acoustic analysis of the data and its perceptive validation, in addition to a series of methodological proposals that will be of considerable use for teaching.
Key words: Discourse analysis, politeness, didactic, Catalan as a foreign language.



1  Introduction

The study of verbal politeness began in the 1970s and 1980s with the publication of three founding theories by Lakoff (1973), Leech (1983) and Brown & Levinson (1987). Since then, the subject has received considerable interest in different languages, a good example of which is the EDICE programme (Studies on the Discourse of Politeness in Spanish; http://www.edice.org/), which has, since 2002, provided knowledge on politeness, impoliteness and related socio-cultural phenomena. EDICE is a network of researchers who carry out studies on the phenomenon of politeness and which has held five international conferences to date. The programme has described the phenomenon of politeness in different variations of Spanish, outlined the social cultural contexts in which different politeness behaviours appear in this language and has contributed to the development of alternative theory models that explain and describe the phenomenon of politeness. For Catalan, however, the phenomenon has not received as much interest as that, with only a few studies by Payrató (1988), Nadeu (2008) and Nadeu & Prieto (2011), and more recently, Devís & Cantero (2014) i Magraner (2017) having been published so far. The results of these studies have not been reflected in the teaching manuals of Catalan as a foreign language or as a second language. If intonation is ever practised in class, it is because the teacher realizes its importance at the earliest levels of learning, and especially when the students' languages are very different from Catalan.

Politeness is a phenomenon with values and effects on the social level of language and  a tool for social relations with strategic purposes in communication, according to the interests of the speakers. Mitigating politeness therefore represents the strategies used by a speaker to lessen his or her imposition or to safeguard the negative image and the self-esteem of the listener. Attenuation is a very useful expression of pragmatic speech for softening the strength of an assertion, expressing, for example, uncertainty in the formulation of a different opinion, presenting disagreement as quasi compliance, and focussing the object of disagreement from an impersonal viewpoint (Haverkate 1994: 117). This study focuses exclusively on melodic strategies.

In general, the most neglected aspect in the study of the phenomenon is relative to the pragmatic function of melodies that imply politeness in speech. The melodic component has recently been considered in studies of Spanish by Álvarez & Blondet (2003), Roldán (2000), Orozco (2008) and Devís (2011), but in Catalan, it continues being largely ignored, with just a few exceptions such as Astruc (2008).

We believe that taking the melodic component into account is necessary because the function of attenuation at the suprasegmental level basically corresponds to intonation. For this reason, melodic features tend to be determinant when interpreting an utterance as more or less polite. Authors such as Quilis (1988, 1993), Hidalgo (2001, 2006, 2007, 2009), Waltereit (2005), Haverkate (1994), Álvarez & Blondet (2003), Briz & Hidalgo (2008) and Devís (2011) have observed how certain forms of intonation in Spanish fulfil the function of attenuation or mitigation in utterances that could contain a sort of implicit "aggressiveness". These forms allow possible conflicts to be avoided and relationships based on cordiality and cooperation to be established between the speakers, something which undoubtedly benefits social and intercultural relations. Unawareness of the more frequent uses in a foreign language could lead to misunderstandings that impede social relations. Currently, there are no studies dedicated to melodic attenuator features in Catalan.

The purpose of this research was therefore to fill this void, analysing the melodic features of mitigating politeness used by Catalan speakers, with the aim of providing methodological resources for teachers of Catalan as a foreign language that could help to prevent conflicts caused by melodic misunderstandings. The results obtained from the acoustic analysis of the data and its perception validation are presented, in addition to a series of methodological proposals we consider to be of considerable use for teaching.

Our methodological proposals are designed for foreign students who learn professional Catalan, specifically for professions that require direct contact with other people. These professions include:
● customer services (help, information, sales, etc.)
● executives, managers, business people, etc. (i.e. professions where there is an established hierarchy and where the manager needs to earn the trust of his or her employees)
● Teachers
● politicians, journalists
● lawyers, doctors, nurses, etc.

In any of these professions, control of the melodic features for mitigating politeness will increase the effectiveness of communication, the quality of the service provided, the satisfaction of the listener and the cultural training of the employee.



2   Methodology

To analyse the data the Melodic-Analysis-of-Speech method was used, presented by Cantero (2002) in his book Theory and Analysis of Intonation. The starting point is the definition of intonation based on the variations of fundamental frequency (F0) that have a linguistic function during an utterance (Cantero 2002: 18). The author considers the function of intonation on three levels:

● Prelinguistic: including the phenomena of accent, rhythm and melody, which work together as co-structuring phonic elements of speech, regardless of any other significant dimension.
On this level, intonation is considered a linguistic container that integrates and delimits units of speech. This is what Quilis (1993: 445) called the "delimiting function" and "integrating function" of intonation. Melodic features characteristic of this level are very specific phonetic features.

● Linguistic: including melodic characteristics, the phonological performance of which allows the functional units of intonation, their linguistic signs, to be characterised and distinguished.

In Catalan eight tonemes have been identified, resulting from the combination of phonological features (/± interrogative, ± suspended, ± emphatic/), which comprise the four types of intonation described by Cantero (neutral, interrogative, suspended and emphatic), the melodic patterns of which constitute typical melodies of Catalan (Font-Rotchés 2007). To date, eight different melodic patterns have been discovered for Catalan, with their variants and their dispersion margins.
● Paralinguistic: including the melodic variants of tonemes, within the wide dispersion margins for each one.
These melodies allow specific emotions to be expressed, idiolectic speech features or those of the speaker's personality. What is more, these variants can be differently coded, as found in the expression of politeness (Devís 2011).

The method for analysing the three intonation levels allows:
● segmentation of the intonation curve into tonal segments (typically one tonal segment per vowel, except for inflections);
● analysis of the intonation regardless of other levels of linguistic analysis;
● analysis of all of the tonal phenomena of speech included in the melody (accent, rhythm and intonation).

The method comprises involves two phases:

● Acoustic phase (descriptive):
extraction of the F0 of the utterance
determination of the values of the F0 vowels. The vowels are identified and the average value recorded
the succession of vowel values creates a main melodic curve, which eliminates irrelevant values
and, finally, standardisation of each melodic pattern obtained in Hz in terms of percentages to create a melody which is independent of the speaker's characteristics.

● Perceptive phase (experimental):
the resulting melody is synthesised using the acoustic analysis programme PRAAT, doing phonetics by computer and the tonal values are replaced with standardised values,
only the values, whose the relevance we want to verify, are modified;
a perceptive experiment is carried out to validate the synthesised melody and / or counter-verify the melodic hypothesis.


3   The Study

3.1 Corpus

The corpus used was the Oral corpus of spontaneous speech created by professor Font-Rotchés between 1999 and 2000. It includes 580 utterances, produced in contexts of dialogue by 160 Catalan speakers, both male and female, between the ages of 18 and 70, from a wide variety of professions. In total, there are 47 hours of audiovisual material from 20 different Catalan television programmes (TV3 and Canal 33) and from the Catalan section on Spanish television (TVE2). The speakers are from different areas of Catalonia, with a few originating from Valencia and Mallorca.


3.2 Description of Mitigating Melodic Features of Catalan

3.2.1 Politeness Code

The data analysed in the acoustic phase enabled the following hypothesis to be posed regarding the melodic features responsible for mitigating utterances that could contain a certain amount of implicit lexicogrammatical aggressiveness.


3.2.1.1  Linguistic Intonation
Below we present a table which lists the melodic features that belong to the linguistic intonation of the politeness code in Catalan:

Final inflection
+ suspended:
(with a final rise between 15% and 70%)
+ neutral (with a fall no greater than 40%)
rising-falling circumflex

These features were extracted from the acoustic and perceptive analysis of the audio recordings analyzed.


3.2.1.2 Paralinguistic Intonation 

Below a table is presented in which the melodic features belonging to the paralinguistic intonation of the politeness code in Catalan are listed:

Emphasis Features
(Broad Focus)
Prominence of atonics (with rises of no more than 30%)
Very flat declinations
Low tonal register
Displaced or absent first peak

Word Emphasis Features
 (Narrow Focus)
                                         Word emphasis with circumflex inflection

These features were extracted from the acoustic and perceptive analysis of the audio recordings analyzed.


3.3 Examples



Figure 1: Standardised Melody of the Utterance: Ataqueu massa 
('You attack too much')

Figure 1 shows a suspended final inflection (+47.8%) from a linguistic intonation point of view, which, in this context, at a pragmatic level works as an attenuating feature to mitigate the implicit aggressiveness of this utterance in a situation of confrontation. This functional transposition of the intonation contour (+ suspended), which, at a pragmatic level, acts as an attenuating mechanism, has already been identified by Hidalgo (2009: 178). On the other hand, the prominence of unstressed vowels, from a paralinguistic viewpoint, becomes a relevant acoustic key for distinguishing a polite utterance from a neutral one - a phenomenon widely recurrent in all of the examples analysed -, which creates a melodic rhythm that distinguishes and characterises utterances of mitigating politeness.



Figure 2: Standardised melody of the utterance: No, després de la brotada no ('No, after the outbreak, no.')  



  
Figure 3: Standardised Melody of the Utterance: Per què treu aquesta impressió vostè de mi ('Why do you have that impression of me?')  

These features, identified during the acoustic phase of the corpus in Catalan, coincide with those identified in Spanish (Devís 2011: 50). In this case, however, other very relevant features of Spanish are not found, such as internal inflections and interrogative final inflections. For this reason, we decided to also include these features in the perceptive phase, with the aim of observing whether or not they were used in Catalan. Their introduction and validation as mitigating features of Catalan led us to conclude that the intonation of mitigating politeness of Catalan and Peninsular Spanish does not represent two clearly differentiated idiomatic codes, but in fact a single, shared cultural code.

The melodic models most used in Catalan to convert, for example, orders into requests and confrontation into cooperation are the following:
1. interrogative final inflection
2. word emphasis with circumflex inflection
3. combination of internal inflections with suspended final inflection
4. combination of internal inflections with circumflex final inflection
5. prominence of unstressed vowels (simple or combined with circumflex final inflection)
6. suspended final inflection

These conclusions are used as a guide for creating the following methodological proposals, which may be useful for teaching the intonation of politeness of Catalan to foreign speakers.



4   Methodological Proposals

In the following, based on the above reflections, we present a sample of three activities for practising the intonation of politeness, designed for a group of B1-level Catalan students. These activities combine the revision or introduction of a number of linguistic functions with interaction sessions.

Before introducing these activities, a general session is held with students so that they can listen to some of the interventions that include the intonation of politeness or impoliteness. In addition to the audio, in which the two types of intonation can be defined, the teacher leads an oral session with the whole class. These two prior sessions should help with the subsequent practical activities presented below.


4.1 Activity 1: La fada no convidada

In this activity, students will practice linguistic structures such as asking for an explanation, the focus being on the intonation of politeness:

Aim: practising the intonation of politeness
Linguistic funtions: asking for an explanation
Level: B1
Time: 30-40 minutes
Skill: oral interaction
Arrangement: pair work

For this activity, students must ask for an explanation as to why someone is cross or angry with them. The proposed scenario is the following one:
An acquaintance is cross because we have not told him anything about our private lives. The reason for this is because we have not seen him for a very long while, only having met up briefly once in the last year. He is angry because everyone else in the group of friends knew and he had not been told by you personally.
Students are asked if something similar has ever happened to them. The different cases are discussed in class, including the questions of what had happened and how the situation was resolved.
Following this, different possible reactions to the situation are discussed, together with the types of structure that could be used to ask for an explanation as to why the person is upset, followed by how we would justify ourselves:
Asking for an explanation:● Et puc preguntar què tens... què et passa... (Will you tell me what's wrong... what the problem is...’)● Estàs bé? (‘Are you OK?’)● Per què fas aquesta cara? (‘What's the long face for?’)● T’ha passat alguna cosa? (‘Is something the matter?’) Justifying ourselves:● Si no t’ho vaig dir, va ser perquè no ens havíem vist en un any... i quan ens vam veure anàvem amb pressa... (If I didn't tell you, it's because I haven't seen you all year... and when we did see each other, there wasn't time...’)● No t’entenc... ni se’m va passar pel cap en aquell moment quan et vaig veure... feia taaannt que no ens vèiem... (‘I don't get it... it didn't even occur to me when I last saw you... it had been soooo long since we last saw each other...’)● No soc de fer proclamacions a tort i a dret... (‘I'm not the type of person who announces their news to all and sundry...’)● Perdona, jo... és que no... (‘I'm sorry... I didn't...’)
Once the structures have been presented, a list of scenarios can be prepared and later on used in conversations. The list below includes a few possible scenarios:
● Changing jobs
● Moving house
● Expecting a baby
● Started seeing someone
● Splitting up from our partner
Students can choose one of these scenarios and invent a dialogue. What is of importance is that the intonation of the offended person must be more rude and impolite, the total opposite of the other person, who must be polite. Finally, after the students have practised their dialogues one of the pairs is asked to present theirs to the class.


4.2 Activity 2: Ni garrepa ni ximple

In this activity, students practice some linguistic structures used to decline a proposal politely:

Aim: practising the intonation of politeness
Linguistic function: not accepting a situation, saying no 
Level: B1
Time: 30-40 minutes
Skill: oral interaction
Arrangement: pair work

The scenario is the following one:
You don't eat much, you don't drink and particularly in the evening, you are happy with just a simple meal. Your group of friends enjoys drinking and eating huge lunches and dinners. You have found yourself in the same situation several times. Your meal only costs 8 euros, but you end up paying 20 euros... You have decided that next time, you will say that you will only pay for your part of the meal. You will have to say this in such a way that you will be understood and not taken the wrong way.
Students are asked if they have ever found themselves in this type of situation. They are invited to explain their experience to the rest of the class.
Following this phase. the structures to be used for saying ‘No’ in this type of situation and which intonation would be the best are presented.
Saying ‘No’:
● Si no us fa res, jo aquesta vegada pagaré només la meva consumició... (‘If it's OK with you, I'll just pay my part of the bill...’)● No tinc gaire gana, jo només demano... i aquesta vegada no col·laboro en el pot... (‘I'm not really hungry, I'll just order... and this time, I won't pay into the kitty...’)● Em sap greu, però avui no entro en el pot perquè no tinc gens de gana...            (‘I feel bad, but I won't pay into the kitty today, I'm not very hungry...’)
Students are invited to add more structures for saying ‘No’.

Following this phase, we suggest practising this linguistic function in other contexts which students improvise. To practice this, the teacher could ask students other questions and get them to answer them. A list of scenarios is provided to which students must respond politely. The activity proposed is therefore an interaction between the teacher and the students, and an assessment of the responses is done immediately.

The possible scenarios are the following ones:
1. You have been asked to contribute to a leaving present for a co-worker who is about to retire. You really don't get on with this colleague, finally, he is leaving... you wouldn't give them a cent.
2. At work some colleagues have suggested buying some plants for the entrance hall, which is very sterile and impersonal. You do not want to take part in this initiative because there is not enough light and the plants will die. You would be throwing money away If you buy plants they're for your home.
3. In the building where you live, the president of the neighbours' association has had the "great" idea to replace the recently bought letterboxes with ones that better suit the building's style. You refuse to pay!

The activity could be developed as follows: The teacher addresses one of the students, explains the situation and makes the request. The student must give a polite answer, rejecting the request. The same scenario can be repeated with another student. After this, students can invent a scenario individually or in pairs and address a fellow student so as to have more practice.


4.3 Activity 3: Les impertinències

Aim: practising the intonation of politeness
Linguistic function: giving a reply
Level: B1
Time: 30-40 minutes
Skill: oral interaction
Arrangement: pair work

In this activity, students will work on verbal impertinence. There are people who are experts at picking on others and being rude. They are capable of making the other person look bad, as in making them feel over-sensitive, stupid or pathetic. In addition, if you do not laugh they add comments such as "Oh, you have touched a sore point... wow... that riled you, how sensitive!".

Students will be given two example of impertinent comments and asked if they would be upset by them or if they would disregard them or, on the contrary, if they would be angry and how they would respond. As the situation involves speech and therefore requires a response, the aim is to define possible responses, which, above all, are polite. We want to make sure that the person is held responsible for his or her impertinence and that we keep face and do not just remain quiet and or simply take it.

Examples of impertinence 
Situation 1: You have a terrace full of plants. You are really happy with it and often jokingly refer to it as a jungle. Friend A asks you to see it. You have some photos and show them to this friend. You end up looking at friend B's holiday photos of a trip to a beautiful jungle. Suddenly, Friend A says: "Wow, that is a jungle, your terrace really is not".
 Situation 2:
A work, a colleague who is at the same professional level as you, is very self-sacrificing (you can tell this by her voice and comments). According to her, rules must be met to the letter. One day you accidentally leave a light on in a meeting room. Your colleague comes into your office and asks who has left the light on (as if it were the end of the world) and once she knows it was you, she announces that it is part of your job to switch off lights, clear up the room, etc.

These scenarios and the possible answers they warrant can be discussed in class but always within the limits of politeness. Impertinent comments can obviously be very varied and therefore, a different response must be given for each situation. However, the group should try and establish some phrases that would be useful in most cases. If students cannot think of any, we can suggest the following and ask what they think about them as possible replies:
No sé per què ho dius això... ‘What do you mean by that...’T’adones del que dius? ‘Do you realise what you just said?’Ho dius de debò? ‘You really mean that’Això, penses tu... ‘That's what you think (with emphasis on you)’ I això, per què ho dius? ‘Why do you say that?’Em sorprens, de tu no esperava un comentari com aquest... ‘I'm surprised, I wouldn't have expected that sort of comment from you...’No sé què vols dir amb això... ‘I'm not sure what you're trying to say...’Caram quin zel poses en tot... ‘Wow, how very enthusiastic you are... (polite, jokingly)’
Once these responses have been discussed, ask students to form pairs and to make up impertinent situations and write them down. Once they have finished, the teacher can gather their papers and hand them out to different pairs.

Students are given time to prepare the scenario and to think of responses to the impertinent comments. When they are ready, they act out the scenarios. The teacher should go around and try and correct the students' responses if necessary.

Once the activity is over, one of the pairs of students should be asked to role-playtheir scenario in front of the class. A discussion should then be held, and other possible responses added.


4.4 Methodological Analysis

We believe that oral activity is of advantage for students at B1 level, who are gaining grammatical structures and still lack fluency. The aim of these exercises is to get to know contexts or situations that are not usually found in textbooks, but which are very realistic. Consequently, students practice structures already learned or learn new ones. In addition, they practice oral language in contexts that can be complex. In such difficult contexts, the use of the intonation of politeness is especially required to reduce conflicts.

In the first activity, the situation is delicate. In such cases, an interlocutor is angry, and it is necessary to wrap up the linguistic structures we want to use, in a gentle intonation. We want to calm the interlocutor down, justify ourselves and do anything we can not to make the situation worse.

In the second activity, the interlocutors might get angry with us or misunderstand our communicative intention if we do not interact properly. The situation is also delicate and requires the use of certain, polite language structures for mitigation.

In the third activity, we might act in a rude way, but our intention is to respond to the attack politely. This is also a delicate case which requires the mastery of certain structures that are appropriate to the situation. In such moments, the interlocutors need to use polite intonation so as to avoid being rude and to master the situation effectively.

In the activities described in the previous sections, the function of intonation was to smooth out situations that are or may be of a conflicting character. In these exercises, students recognized the value of intonation in situations of conflict, which enabled them to solve these conflicts or, at least, not to generate new ones. Students may also have found that the linguistic structures suggested in these situations were rather direct at times. If these structures are, however, pronounced using the polite mitigation strategies, they can no longer be considered as aggressive.

Students generally like these activities because they give them the opportunity to master realistic contexts which differ from the ones usually employed in textbooks. These contexts, and also the focus laid on the intonation of politeness, are new to them as they have not been included in the textbooks of Catalan as a foreign language.

In teaching the pronunciation of Catalan as a foreign or as a second language, only isolated sounds and linkages are traditionally studied. Only in very few textbooks for teaching Catalan to foreigners can information on the intonation of questions and exclamations be found. Traditional textbooks of Catalan have not yet been updated in terms of expressive intonation, nor with regard to such basic terms as the identification of the tonic syllable (Bartolí Rigol 2018).

It is therefore of high importance to focus on intonation because politeness is expressed differently, depending on the language. This is why it is useful to practice oral skills that emphasize intonation: wrong intonation can easily generate misunderstandings between the speakers involved.


5   Conclusions

As anticipated above, the study of the pragmatic functions of the melodic component has been traditionally ignored for Catalan. In the case of politeness, the phonic component has been largely disregarded. The research done either fails to mention it or does so merely superficially in search of descriptive compromise solutions (Pons-Moll et al. 2019, Carrera-Sabaté 2017). Our research aims to fill this void, classifying mitigating politeness features for Catalan and at the same time offering methodological proposals designed for foreign professional students of Catalan.

The analysis of the acoustic data has led us to the conclusion that the melodic politeness features do not form part of the linguistic code of the language (which, in intonation, would be exclusively the phonological features), but of the paralinguistic code, shared, not by speakers of the language, but by a specific speech community. Arguably, not all speakers of a language mark politeness in the same way, nor do they follow the same code (particularly among speakers of dialectal variations in different regions). Despite this, mitigating politeness is part of a level of intonation analysis that is very close to becoming a stable or semi-stable code Cantero & Mateo (2011): socially and culturally shared, close to the linguistic code (because it enables direct intercomprehension), not language specific, however, but speech-community specific.

The definition of this code has allowed a series of useful methodological proposals to be created. These proposals have been divided into two parts. The first part presents the content through a perception activity which introduces different examples of (im)polite intonation. This is followed by an identification session to provide students with a greater command of the content to be worked on. The purpose of this part of the activity is that the teacher can intervene and look out for students’ utterances which may be difficult or problematic with regard to both the production and perception of the intonation of politeness. The second part provides the chance to practise intonation through different interaction activities, which also allow linguistic functions to be revised or introduced that suit the different situations or contexts created during the activity.

This type of activity that focuses on the intonation of politeness is presently not found in manuals of Catalan as a foreign language (i.e. Fil per randa A2, Curs de llengua catalana 1, and Veus 1). The intonation of politeness, however, represents a subject that should be included in textbooks of Catalan, particularly in those used for teaching Catalan to professionals, for whom politeness is essential for efficient communication and successful business.


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Authors:

M. Bartolí Rigol
Teacher of Catalan as a second language
Consorci per a la Normalització Lingüística  Barcelona
Email: mbartoli@cpnl.cat
Barcelona

E.Devís Herraiz
Teacher in the Department of Language and Literature of the University of Barcelona
Department of Linguistic Education
Faculty of Education (Campus Mundet)
Univesity of Barcelona
Email: devis@ub.edu 
Barcelona