On the importance of the prosodic component in the expression of linguistic im/politeness

This paper outlines the important relationship between prosody and im/politeness and presents a brief overview of what has been done in this field. Sections 2, 3 and 4 present several theoretical concepts which are especially relevant for understanding im/politeness in concrete frameworks (mainly in conversation). Section 5 points out the necessity of studying a pragmatic phenomenon like im/politeness with its prosodic expression. Finally, section 6 discusses some studies in this field on different languages, with a special focus on prosodic values like the F-o (pitch/fundamental frequency), intonation patterns, duration and speech rate.