General Attitudinal Meanings in RP Intonation (Linguistics‪)‬

ABSTRACT The article takes a cognitive view of the attitudinal meanings of RP intonation. A summary statement is included about previous authors' views on attitudes conveyed by pitch direction. Data on intonation patterns concentrating on pitch level are followed by the labels of emotional attitudes from phonetic literature. These descriptive labels are brought into correlation with a large number of metaphoric phrases and fixed collocations and expressions which give a clue to structural metaphors for emotional attitudes. In this way, strict regularities in correspondences have been found between the triangle made up of nucleus + head variations, emotions as labelled in phonetic literature, and EMOTION IS TEMPERATURE metaphors. Metonymy also plays a part: emotion stands for a bodily sensation felt during the emotion. These regularities are believed to underlie and govern the use of intonation tunes.