La mimique buccale

Abstract

The mechanism for the acoustic encoding of emotions was analyzed by means of two X-ray films containing neutral and emotional variants (anger, hate, sadness, joy, tenderness, irony) of six Hungarian phrases. Each attitude is expressed by an articulatory pattern peculiar to it. This oral gesture can be seen as superimposed on the (ideal) neutral articulation. Each concrete sound necessarily contains two pieces of information differing profoundly both at the level of content (conceptual vs. preconceptual) and of expression (arbitrary linguistics vs. non-arbitrary prelinguistic encoding). In some cases, this double encoding is reflected in ambiguous and contradictory lingual articulation.