(Amphithéâtre)
Magno Caldognetto, Emanuela
(ISTC CNR Padua section, Padova)
Rhetoric of political gesture :
a qualitative analysis with Multimodal
Score implemented in ANVIL
Traditionally rhetoric isolates and identifi es the idiosyncratic linguistic
characteristics of a speaker, centering on the persuasive goal
of his discourse. As political speech is considered rhetoric, political
discourse has the goal to convince the audience and persuasion
passes not only through words or rhetoric fi gures but also gesture.
To study this particular aspect of rhetoric, we use the Multimodal
Score implemented in ANVIL. The most distinctive characteristic of
this annotation system is that it aims at identifying the meaning
of each movement or gesture and translating it into words or sentences :
for example the index fi nger stretched up could mean “attention
please”.
In this research we focus on the coproduction of speech and gestures
in four samples of political speech, roughly of the same length
and with a similar camera perspective, analyzed with the Multimodal
Score implemented in ANVIL method. We intend to examine four gestures
we meet in political speech : fi nger bunch, ring handshape and
joined or praying hands (Kendon, 1995). Thanks to the Multimodal
Score implemented in ANVIL we could capture the visual cues of politicians’
speech and label at the same time both phonetic-prosodic
cues and gestures. This permitted us to inspect the time relationship
and the coordination of these two aspects of multimodal communication,
focusing on coverbal gesture.
Our research procedure is the following : on the lexical level we fi rst
transcribe phrases and sentences and point out some particular
political terms used by politicians (i.e. politichese, Cortellazzo 1994).
Secondly, we transcribe and analyze the phones and syllables, as
well as the pitch and intensity contours, identifying prosodic aspects
of the speech like e.g. on the level of topic-comment structures.
Finally, we analyze the relationship between linguistic-prosodic phenomena
and gestures, in order to see to what extent gestures may
have persuasive and/or metaphoric functions in relationship with
rhetoric aspects of speech.
