The use of paralinguistic features for the expression of emotions, intentions and attitudes in political discourse

Tehran

Congreso; The Second International Conference on Laboratory Phonetics & Phonology (ICLPP); 2021

Alzahra University

This work aims at presenting the results of part of a study that looks into theuse of paralinguistic features (PFs) for the expression of emotions, intentionsand attitudes in political discourse. Following Brown?s (1990) taxonomy, wedefine these features as vocal cues ?which contribute directly to theinterpretation of the verbal content of the message? (p. 113). This studyanalyses the use of these features in the inaugural address of Theresa May,former Prime Minister of the UK, delivered after the elections on July 16, 2016.The findings result from a twofold phonological analysis followed by theinterpretation of the affective states the vocal cues detected convey. First, weresorted to trained auditory analysis by professional phoneticians. This allowedus to identify only those vocal cues that are relevant for the expression ofemotions, intentions and attitudes and have an impact on the human ear. Thisanalysis was, then,supplemented with acoustic measures of pitch, intensity andduration using PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2020). The presence of the PFsdetected through the perceptual analysis was confirmed. The findings revealthe most frequent PFs used in the sample analysed and their frequency ofoccurrence. Besides, this information allowed us to make a situatedinterpretation of the emotions the speaker tried to convey through the use ofthose vocal cues. Finally, quantitative analysis revealed associations betweenthe most frequently used PFs and the possible emotions, intentions and attitudesthese conveyed.