Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. kötet (1990)

Tanulmányok - Péter, Mihály: Once again on Language and Music (A semiotic approach) 163

ONCE AGAIN ON LANGUAGE AND MUSIC 165 Summing up what has been discussed so far we can say that the meaning of a musical sign (its signifié) is the inner world of man (above ail its emotional sphère) in its indeterminate objectivity—abstracted from any concrète circumstances, causes, situations, etc. Now the question is whether a similar type of sign occurs in natural language as well, and I think the answer is affirmative. There are différent devices at the disposai of natural language to express or communicate the emotional attitudes of the speaker. Some of thèse devices are realized on the plane of expression as self-contained phonemestrings, i.e. words or morphèmes. On the plane of content, thèse words or morphèmes transpose the émotions into the conceptual sphère, they express them as emotionally evaluative features of meaning-complexes (e.g. snob, spiv, lassie, womanish). Another group of devices, however, do not form self-contained phoneme-strings but are attached to such strings. They include word-order and, above ail, intonation. Intonation is the most complex phenomenon of human language. Its primary function is the formation of utterances as the basic units of speech. In accordance with the double articulation of language, intonation performs this function both on the content side and on the expression side, i.e. on the one hand it constitutes the sensé of the utterance, on the other hand it imposes structure upon the utterance itself. The most important aspect of the sense-constituting function of intonation is carrying out the illocutionary act of the utterance, i.e. representing the purposefulness and expediency of speech as a conscious human activity. Illocution includes the communicative type of the utterance (whether it is a statement, a question, or a wish, etc.), and the topic-comment articulation as well as the emotional content, and it is often precisely this emotional content that is responsible for the subcategorization of illocutionary acts (consider for example the Wide variety of incitement types, such as entreating, requesting, persuading, advising, warning, commanding, ordering, etc.). A great part of emotional intonation is specific, differing from language to language and in fact from dialect to dialect, is difficult to acquire, and may cause serious disorders in communication when incorrectly used. AU this suggests that we should not—though many linguists do—regard intonation as a natural and universal code which works parallel to (i.e. "before" or "below") language, but we should recognize its linguistic status and try to define its nature as a spécifie sign. It is obvious, that emotional intonation, differing in languages and even in langauge-varieties, is not emotion itself, and thus it also fulfils the basic condition of being a sign: aliquid stat pro aliquo. At the same time, however, emotional intonation differs from the majority of linguistic signs in that its meaning does not contain conceptual generalization. The Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. 1990.