El uso de rasgos paralingüísticos en el discurso político : una caracterización del género discursivo

Abstract

The present work aims to characterise political speeches considering the use of a group of paralinguistic features (PF) taken from Brown’s (1990) taxonomy (rhetorical pause, loudness, timing of segments, tempo), and to explore the relationships between these vocal cues and the expression of emotions, intentions and attitudes. The sample consisted of two presidential inaugural speeches by one female and one male speaker: Theresa May’s 2016 inaugural and Barack Hussein Obama’s 2013 second inaugural. The study conducted resorted to both qualitative and quantitative methods. The qualitative analysis consisted of different steps. First, trained auditory analysis was carried out by professional phoneticians to identify the PFs under analysis in the samples. Second, this analysis was supplemented with acoustic measures using PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2021). Third, the trained analysts proceeded to make a situated interpretation of the emotions the speakers were believed to convey through the use of those vocal cues. Quantitative information was obtained when the frequency of occurrence of each of the PFs analysed and of the different emotions were calculated. Finally, associations between the PFs in focus in this study and the attitudes, emotions or intentions detected were established. A preliminary hierarchy of PFs derived from the analysis. The rhetorical pause is the most frequently used PF in the political speeches analysed. As regards the relationships between the PFs analysed and the expression of emotion, the data yielded contradictory results. From the data gathered and the results obtained, this work explored the pedagogical implications for the teaching and learning of PFs when reading aloud political speeches at university level in EFL contexts such as the School of Languages, UNC.