Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’Errico, Laura Vincze,
Alessandro Vinciarelli (Eds.)
Political
speech.
Multimodal
communication to shape minds and
social action
SSPNet International Workshop.
Rome, Italy, November 10-12, 2010
Revised Selected Papers
One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world
We dedicate this book to Malala, a young Afghani woman wounded while struggling
for the education of all children in the world.
A bright example of the political relevance of speech.
Introduction
Political speech: words and bodies as a means for social
influence
From political communication to social influence
Political discourse has been a subject for the study of communication since the very
beginning of western philosophical speculation: [1], Sophists, and the first studies in
rhetoric find their roots in Greek democracy, with its need to elaborate and teach
techniques for reasoning and argumentation. Later, if [2] set the stage for research in
argumentation for the next centuries, [3] and [4] also took into account body
communication as an important part of the Orator’s repertoire, by focusing on the use
of gestures, voice, posture, gaze and facial expression.
In the last century, the study of political discourse, within studies on persuasion was
mainly taken up by the New Rhetoric [5], Argumentation Theory [6] and Sociology
[7]. In Psychology the Elaboration Likeliness Model [8] and the heuristic-systematic
model [9] particularly influential since the late eighties, distinguished a central and a
peripheral route taken by the Receiver of a persuasive message, on the one side its
content, on the other its perceptual and affective aspects. But such distinction between
the rational side of persuasion and its seemingly marginal features is not so different
from the one made by [2] of three aspects of persuasion: logos – the logical
argumentation, ethos – the character of the persuader, and his capacity to inspire trust,
and pathos – the emotions of the audience; the last two being most typically conveyed
by perceptual and affect-inducing features of the message – attractiveness of the
source, his voice, body appearance, but also his charisma, as it appears from his
physical and mental qualities.
While most literature on argumentation and fallacies has mainly focused on the
aspects of logos, more recently the affective aspects of persuasion have been stressed
[10; 11; 12] and the bodily features of persuasive behavior have been investigated [13;
14; 15; 16;]
However, during the last twenty years Computer Science has burst on the scene of
multimodality, mainly due to interest in the detection and synthesis of Social Signals.
In order to build systems for the automatic recognition of gestures, head movements,
facial expressions, postures [17; 18], and to simulate them in Embodied Agents and
other graphic computer-human interfaces [19], computer scientists and social
scientists have started collaborating to enhance each other’s research results: social
scientists’ in-depth analyses of communicative signals contribute to build detection
algorithms and simulations in ECAs, while system evaluations provide a test of the
computational models produced, and a feedback for future research.
On November 10th – 12th, 2010, on behalf of the European Network of Excellence
SSPNet (Social Signal Processing Network), aimed at creating a strong connection
between Social Scientists and Computer Scientists in research on social signals and in
their automatic processing, an International Workshop on “Political Speech” was held
at Roma Tre University, Department of Education Sciences, in which important
representatives of various disciplines – Social Psychology, Political Science,
Linguistics, Theory of Argumentation, Multimodal Communication, Natural
Language Processing, Human-Computer Interfaces, etc. – met to investigate and
discuss mechanisms, processes and tools of political communication. This volume is a
follow-up of that common work.
The book has two main objectives: the first is to widen the study of political
discourse from the analysis of bare verbal monological discourse and dialogic
interaction to the analysis of the whole multimodal message; the very title “Political
Speech” intends to stress that a thorough consideration of political discourse in faceto-face interaction encompasses not only the words and argumentation employed by
politicians, but their voice quality, prosody, intonation, their gestures, gaze and facial
expressions, posture, head and body movements. The second objective is to consider
the impact of technology and Computer Science on political discourse, their effects
over people, and their methods of analysis, by stressing the two-ways interactions
between them.
On the one side, technology may serve as a tool for the analysis of political speech,
but the analysis in its turn may provide hints to the construction of systems for
automatic recognition or simulation in Embodied Agents. The ultimate goal of such
work is to turn the knowledge achieved in Sociology, Political Science, Linguistics,
Psychology into an effort to implement more persuasive technologies, for example by
evaluating the persuasive impact of some words, prosodic or gestural features,
argumentative or affective strategies, or by providing hints for the synthesis of
persuasive agents.
Issues in political communication
Among the various relevant topics in the study of political communication, one is its
heavy intertwining with technology: social networks may count both as a tool and as a
database for data mining and sentiment analysis research [20]. The use of social
networks by Barack Obama in the States or Beppe Grillo in Italy revealed a shift from
TV to interactive media as the main route to electoral consensus. Was the application
of sentiment analysis to these media simply a consequence or possibly even a cause of
Obama’s victory or political activism? [21; 22; 23; 24].
These phenomena require a novel look at some classical results of social psychology
research. Should social networks have existed at the time of Moscovici [25], would he
have phrased the construct of minorities’ influence the way he did? Are social
networks more a case of majority or minority influence? Models of persuasion in the
first part of the 20th century – since the bullet theory [26] on – see the receiver as a
passive subject, while those since the sixties (e.g. [27]) credit him/her with a more
active attitude. Nowadays a person navigating in the new media might look more like
the latter than the former: s/he can participate more, open a new group, feel in a peer
relationship with others; s/he is not subjected to information but may search for it.
Therefore a topic that the study of political communication must take into account is
the web revolution.
Another relevant issue in political discourse refers to its being a case of persuasive
communication, hence a way to influence people’s action through influencing their
beliefs. This raises, among others, the issue of knowledge manipulation. Within the
many possible ways to conceal, withdraw, distort information, are there some verbal
or bodily strategies that are most typically used in politics? Are there particularly
subtle ways to manipulate an addressee’s mind, like for instance, the use of fallacies,
obscurity, ambiguity or vagueness? Are there ways to train laypeople to defend
themselves from such manipulation strategies? How might educational programs – for
example, courses in Critical Thinking – take advantage of new findings to enhance
political self-consciousness in young and older citizens? Might technology be of help
in this, not only through the immediate spreading of news and action decisions, e.g.,
by Twitter, but also, for instance, by implementing systems for the automatic
recognition (or for training human recognition) of deceptive messages, vague
information, or fallacious argumentations?
Actually, since not only the clarity or sincerity of the message, but also its source is
of the utmost importance for its efficacy, a relevant issue in research on political
speech is the management of the politician’s image, in which body behavior has a
great role. What aspects of a politician’s multimodal communication are mainly
responsible for the impression s/he gives to the audience? The notion of charisma,
along with the physical aspects in which it is manifested (voice, expression, style of
behavior) is presently a subject of investigation [28; 29] but given its being a
multidimensional construct encompassing mental, affective, perceptual, social aspects,
only an interdisciplinary effort might be able to disentangle its multifaceted nature.
Furthermore, besides caring their own self-presentation, politicians often try to
undermine their opponents’ image, using the weapons of discredit and denigration.
What are, at present, the means of political delegitimization? Is political discourse
more blatantly aggressive than it was in the past? How does the use of new media
affect the public spreading of bad reputation?
Finally, a topic presently investigated also as to its multimodal direct and indirect
signals is conflict and its dynamics of escalation, negotiation, reconciliation [30; 31].
Since politics is a prototypical case of conflict, studying conflict and their signals in
the paradigmatic scenario of political debates might provide new tools also for
recognizing conflict dynamics in other fields, like between couples, or at the
workplace. Moreover, while conflict has been studied more as to the internal
psychological issues – for example, studies on reconciliation [32; 33] have highly
stressed the importance of internal feelings of victims and perpetrators of violence –
what has still to be investigated in depth are the signals that most specifically indicate
or trigger negotiation and reconciliation processes. And once you master signals of
negotiation or reconciliation you might manage these processes better, once you can
read signals of escalation, you might learn to prevent escalation.
The tangled net of political speech
The papers in this book analyze political speech in various modalities, while adopting
a number of approaches and disciplines and dealing with various topics.
Some papers analyze political communication in the verbal modality, by taking only
or mainly monological discourse into account (Cedroni; Longobardi; Conoscenti;
Catellani et al.; Sensales et al.; Bongelli et al.; Zurloni & Anolli) and studying their
lexical, textual or rhetorical patterns. Other works, relying on a conversation analysis
approach (Koutsombogera & Papageorgiou), take the structure of turn-taking,
overlaps and interruptions during political discussions as a cue to the social and
communicative relationships of power and dominance. Two papers take into account
the acoustic modality investigating phonetic aspects of political speech (Martin and
Salvati & Pettorino) or analyzing the lexical and syntactic structures that trigger
laughter or applause (Guerini et al.), while others focus on the visual aspects (gaze,
gestures, facial expressions) of communicative interaction during political talk shows
or parliamentary speeches (D’Errico et al.; Leone; Maricchiolo et al.; Paggio &
Navarretta; Shaw) or on linguistic as well as bodily, visual and acoustic aspects of
political discourse in presidential rallies (Gelang) and TV spots (Pellegrino et al.).
Contributors come from different disciplines and research areas, from political
science (Cedroni) to social psychology (Catellani et al.; D’Errico, et al.; Leone;
Sensales et al.; Maricchiolo et al.), linguistics (Longobardi; Bongelli et al.),
argumentation theory (Zurloni), rhetoric (Gelang) phonetics (Martin; Salvati &
Pettorino), computational linguistics (Conoscenti; Guerini), conversation analysis
(Paggio & Navarretta; Kousombogera & Papageorgiou), and their approaches
range from traditional and lexicographic text analysis (Cedroni; Longobardi;
Zurloni & Anolli; Sensales et al.) to data mining (Conoscenti; Guerini et al.), from
experimental research to observation and analysis of corpora. The fragments of
political communication taken into account involve politicians from diverse political
tendencies and diverse countries: U.S.A., Ireland, Greece, France, Italy.
Although the papers in this book might be clustered in very different ways,
according to even other criteria beside the ones above, here we distinguish them
following a classic of political discourse, Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”, that devotes the first
book to the Orator, the second to the Audience, the third to Discourse proper. In Part I
we then deal with the Sender of the message, that is, with the aspects of his/her
multimodal behavior that contribute to the persuasiveness of political discourse; Part
II deals with the effects of the Orator’s behavior on the Audience; and Part III with the
content and structure of the Discourse: on the one side, what are the topics specifically
chosen by the Orator in his/message, on the other its lexical, discursive, rhetorical,
argumentative structure.
The Orator
Koutsombogera & Papageorgiou study persuasion and interruption attempts during
political interviews as cues to conversational dominance [34]. They describe the
contribution of participants’ multimodal behavior to the management of interruptions
and, in so doing, to the achievement of their persuasive goals. All instances of
overlaps accompanied by non-verbal activity were automatically extracted,
distinguishing collaborative overlaps, such as turn-completing or feedback, from
competitive overlaps (pure interruptions) aimed at taking the floor to restrict the
conversational rights of the other speaker. Koutsombogera & Papageorgiou notice the
speakers' tendency to make use of more than one modality to interrupt: debaters make
use of facial expressions, gestures, body posture movements. Interruptions are
assessed in terms of success and contribution to dominance and persuasiveness (seen
from the perspective of the reactions of the co-locutor to the interruption). Although
an interruption is generally considered successful and an interruptor as dominant when
the interruptee withdraws and the interruptor completes the turn, this is not always the
case. The interruptee, by managing the interruption and advancing counter-arguments,
or by facial expressions communicating annoyance, disconfirmation or surprise, might
lessen the persuasive effect of the interruptor and his temporary dominance.
Koutsombogera & Papageorgiou's analysis gives us a broad picture of the multimodal
behavior of both interruptor and interruptee, emphasizing the power of the facial
expressions of the latter in diminishing the successful impact of the interruption.
Another study which emphasizes the importance of multimodal behavior in
presidential debates is Gelang’s comparative analysis of Barack Obama’s and Hillary
Clinton’s actio. With a rhetorical approach to multimodal communication, Gelang
examines the politicians’ actio – their set of body behaviors in delivering a discourse –
in relation to the concept of ethos and its possible argumentative dimensions. Starting
from the importance of actio in the rhetorical training of classical orators, Gelang
finds out two rhetorical actio strategies used in political debates: enacted (active
energetic, dynamic actio) and restrained (moderated, limited degree of expressiveness
and energy). These two rhetorical strategies can function as ethos-related
argumentation, and be used by debaters to acclaim or defend their own ethos and/or to
attack the ethos of the opponent, influencing the way politicians are perceived by the
audience. In her comparative study of Hillary Clinton’s enacted, passionate ethos and
Obama’s restrained ethos, Gelang puts forward an interesting possible reason why
electors voted for Obama: exhibiting a restrained ethos may be perceived as being
more fit to becoming a president, since it is seen as an evidence of being in control of
the situation.
An opposite case of a negative image projected by a politician’s multimodal
behavior is illustrated by Shaw in her analysis of the unpopular Irish female Minister
of Education. Shaw analyzes both the Minister’s discourses in the Northern Ireland
Assembly and the interviews released by her colleagues and opponents about the
Minister. Her linguistic and body communication style (finger wagging, planting both
feet on the floor, aggressive sentences, no mitigation and in general her
“confrontational stance”) is stigmatized as a definitely “masculine” style, that
according to the Author contributed to her becoming very unpopular, so much so as to
be the most likely cause for people not to vote for her in subsequent elections.
The next two chapters provide synchronic and diachronic analysis of the acoustic
features of three important exponents of French and Italian politics. Martin, after
presenting the notions of Prosodic Events and Prosodic Structure, the general
principles of prosody and the constraints to prosodic structures in read and
spontaneous speech, applies the software Winpitch to analyze fragments of speech by
Nicolas Sarkozy e Ségolène Royal. In Royal he finds a high quantity of text prefixes,
and melodic contours very often falling but never conclusive, that do not allow the
listener to finally process the whole sentence, and make her sentences very similar to
the long sentence prescribed by the canons of the École Nationale d’Administration;
this, characterizing her speech as typical of the dominant class, might have possibly
backfired against her pretense to be seen as a leftist leader. To the contrary, Sarkozy
splits single kernels into smaller units ended by conclusive contours, allowing the
listener to process his sequence of text faster and more easily, which may result in a
more comprehensible and appealing speech.
Salvati & Pettorino present a diachronic analysis of the suprasegmental aspects of
Berlusconi’s speech from 1994 through 2010. Taking into account his spontaneous
speech during discourses, debates and interviews, in a corpus focused on common
themes, they measure duration of speech chains, number of syllables per chain,
maximum and minimum pitch, and calculate the prosodic features of articulation rate,
speech rate, average duration of silent pauses, fluency and tonal range. Their results
show a fair consistency of Berlusconi’s speech across time for all parameters, along
with a high level of adaptation to different interlocutors and situations. For example
his speech rate – the number of words per time unit – that is considered a cue to
dominant versus submissive relationship with the interlocutor, is lower during an
interview with a journalist quite prone to his will than with others he is afraid of,
before whom he tries to avoid silences, probably not to let them take the turn. The
same effect is found for tone range, typically lower in prepared discourses in which
Berlusconi feels in a dominant position and wants to convey authority and selfconfidence. By calculating duration of his silent pauses, the Authors find that
Berlusconi makes more use of emphatic pauses in discourses than in interviews,
probably, again, because a longer silence might give a journalist the opportunity to
take the floor. In conclusion, even from the acoustic point of view, Berlusconi’s skills
as communicator – his clarity, witnessed by low articulation rate, and his capacity of
adapting his speech to different power relationships – show a remarkable constancy
overtime.
The Audience
A second set of papers examines verbal or body communicative behavior while also
focusing on their effects over the audience.
Catellani, Bortolotti & Covelli study the use of counterfactuals and their effects on
the overall effectiveness of politicians’ argumentative strategies. Counterfactuals are
hypothetic clauses, generally expressed by a conditional like “if only …. then” that
simulate a better or worse alternative to an event actually occurred by changing one or
more elements in it; they are often exploited by politicians as an indirect defensive
strategy, generally to shift responsibility of negative outcomes from themselves or to
load them over the opponents. These authors take into account self-focused downward
counterfactuals and other-focused upward counterfactuals, that is, respectively, ones
leading to imagine what negative events would have occurred if they had not done
what they did, and what positive events would have resulted from something that their
opponents did not do. In a corpus of political discourses, they find out that the
government is more frequently the target of counterfactuals than the oppositions or
others, and that politicians are more inclined to produce hypothetical scenarios with
better outcomes than the real one (upward counterfactuals), and to use counterfactuals
focused on controllable than on uncontrollable behaviors. In general, politicians show
a marked tendency to use upward, controllable counterfactuals that target their
opponents, probably to charge them with responsibility for negative events. A study
demonstrates the effectiveness of counterfactuals in shifting responsibility to the
opponents and in enhancing positive self-presentation of the Speaker as decided,
tenacious, competent, but not so much as honest, sincere, trustworthy.
From a Computational Linguistics perspective, Guerini presents CORPS, a textual
corpus of political speeches annotated with audience reactions such as laughter,
booing and applause, which can be usefully exploited in persuasive expressive
mining, prediction of text impact, automatic analysis of political communication, and
persuasive natural language generation. Some first statistics on the corpus, that
includes more than 8 million words from speeches in U.S.A. campaigns by 197
American politicians including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton,
George Bush, Laura Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, show that tag density for
audience reactions is slightly higher for Conservative than Democrat speakers, and
that irony dwells the same in both groups, but the density of negative-focus tags,
representing a more aggressive rhetoric, is eleven times higher in the Conservative
than in the Democrat group.
Navarretta & Paggio's paper is a proof of how multimodal behavior during
political debates may increase the Speaker’s persuasiveness. The paper focuses on two
political debates, the 2010 British general election debate, having as participants
David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg, and the 2008 American presidential
election candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain. The two candidates who during
the debate were more successful in multimodally identifying their interlocutor through
speech and gesture, are also the ones judged as the winners of the debate by several
opinion polls. The Authors’ analysis proves how deictic expressions and gestures
singling out the interlocutor of a political message are important rhetorical devices
increasing persuasiveness in political debates. They present an analysis of the gestures
performed on the one side by Obama and McCain, and on the other by Cameron,
Brown and Clegg, judged by the coders as contributing to interlocutor identification.
Head movements and gaze direction, generally co-occurring, are the most recurrent
ways to identify the interlocutor. Other types of gestures are body and hand gestures,
although used to a lesser extent and always in correspondence to head and/or gaze
movements towards the interlocutor. When it comes to comparing the two adversaries,
Navarretta and Paggio observe an important difference in their multimodal behavior.
When speaking, Obama clearly turns towards his various interlocutors (moderator,
audience, guests or McCain) and performs pointing gestures while gazing at them,
thus clearly designating who his interlocutors are. McCain instead frequently moves
his body and shifts gaze direction changing his focus of attention from Obama to the
audience, moderator and his notes on the table, giving a hard time to the annotator in
deciding who his interlocutor is. Other features of McCain’s multimodal behavior
might have had a counter-persuasive effect on the audience, like sometimes assuming
a threatening attitude with his body leaning towards the camera, his index finger
raised while addressing the audience and his ironic smiling during Obama's speaking
turn. These multimodal behaviors might have induced the audience to perceive him as
a threatening, disrespectful candidate.
Maricchiolo, Gnisci & Bonaiuto in a study on the two Italian right-wing and leftwing leaders, Silvio Berlusconi and Romano Prodi, examine their gestures and their
verbal rhetorical strategies (presence of list, contrast, extreme formulation, denial,
metaphor, humor, proverbs). By combining the participants’ coding of the politician’s
communicative behavior and their evaluation of the speakers as persuasive, pleasant,
expert, calm, and of their answers as understandable, credible, interesting, the authors
find relevant differences in the styles of the two orators, and in their effects in
observers of different political orientation. Berlusconi makes more use of metaphor
and Prodi more of contrast and humor, both use many rhythmical and cohesive
gestures and few iconics; the former uses more rhythmical, deictics and objectadaptors, the latter more metaphorics, emblems, self-adaptors and cohesives: two
patterns of body and rhetoric style quite consistent with the two leaders’ personalities,
quiet and rational for Prodi, impetuous, eager, sometimes aggressive for Berlusconi.
Different from previous studies, they conclude that the verbal and body behavior of
the last speech under election does not change vote intentions substantively in left
voters, but generally reinforces previous convictions in right voters.
The Discourse: Contents
Concerning the very message conveyed in political speech, we can distinguish on the
one side the content – what do politicians speak about in their persuasive attempts –
and the discourse structures – the lexical, argumentative, rhetorical structure through
which this content is communicated.
Within the contents conveyed by politicians, Leone, after proposing some possible
accounts of the personalization trend in politics, analyzes Barack Obama’s
autobiographical memories in two speeches, pointing at their functions that, far from
being a self-exposure strategy directly aimed at self-glorification, can be mainly seen
“as an ‘identity message’ to gain credibility as a new kind of leader in a new
globalized world, but also as a resource to enhance ongoing international
reconciliation processes”. Obama uses autobiographical memories to recall either the
social dimensions that historically shaped his own life, or personal aspects of his own
past. In the speech given in Accra (Ghana) during his visit to Sub-Saharan Africa, by
words, gestures, posture, facial expression Obama clarifies that while Western
countries must accept their responsibilities over Africa, such as colonialism and
economic oppression, on the other hand Africa must also acknowledge its own
responsibilities, like children-soldiers and political corruption, and take its own future
in its hands. While recalling the story of his family, his body signals the humiliation of
his grandfather, always called “boy” by his employer, but his proud posture displays
the “attitude of the pariah that, fully aware of the social exclusion of his group of
birth, does not hide its origins”. Here he uses the social sharing of his family
memories as a means for the reconciliation process between Africa and Western
countries. In the speech at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta Obama mentions
personal memories (as opposed to the family memories of the Accra speech) about the
land of his youth, and the “time that helped shape his childhood”. The difference from
the other speech is mirrored by difference in bodily expression that contributes to the
descriptive and affective function of these memories, following their now tender, now
proud mood.
Sensales, Dal Secco & Areni present, in a Social Representations view, a
lexicographic analysis of news headlines and text during the Italian rally of 2008.
Taking into account variables such as the leaders’ personality, pragmatic vs.
ideological style, positive vs. negative register, orientation to present, past or future,
the Authors show that left, right and centre have similar orientations to present, past
and future, thus disconfirming that the left breaks with the past; yet, as proposed by
previous literature, the left is more focused on ideological-abstract features, and the
right more on pragmatic and concrete dimensions. While only for some parties text
analysis shows a prevailing stress on the leader as opposed to one on the party itself,
from a Big Five point of view the most characterizing feature for both the right and
the left leader (though much more so for the right), is energy/extraversion. In all three
orientations, right, left and center, the affirmative register is more frequently exploited
than the attack or the defensive one, but attack holds more in the right than in the left.
Bongelli, Riccioni & Zuczkowski analyze the communication of
certainty/uncertainty, true/false and good/evil in a corpus of Italian monological
political discourse. Their aim is to identify which and how many lexical and
morphosyntactic markers of certainty and uncertainty are used and how much
certainty and uncertainty are communicated by the speakers. From their analysis it
results that in both pre-election rallies and parliamentary discourse the communication
of certainty prevails over that of uncertainty. Although both types of political
discourse are characterized by a rather low number of uncertainty markers, these are
fewer in pre-election rallies than in parliamentary speeches. Interestingly enough,
uncertainty, when communicated, is signaled in both speeches by less explicit
markers: morpho-sintactic markers such as if clauses, subjunctives and conditionals,
instead of lexical markers such as “mi sembra” (it seems to me), “forse” (maybe),
“chissà” (who knows). Together with the dichotomy Certainty/Uncertainty, other
polarized concepts are present in the corpus: Good/Evil and Truth/Falsehood, where
the speaking party is always presented as benevolent and honest, while the counter
candidate party as evil and dishonest. Of the two types of political discourse, the
parliamentary one contains a higher amount of mitigation devices – and thus
uncertainty markers – in the accusations of evil and false against the counter
candidate. A possible explanation could be that the goal at stake is higher in preelection discourse and the speakers use every possible means to attack the opponent,
even discrediting him, to win the audience over.
Discrediting the opponent, that is, spoiling his or her image, is the persuasive
strategy analyzed by D’Errico, Poggi & Vincze, who analyze the ways in which
politicians discredit each other in political debates, through words and multimodal
behavior, and the effect of these discrediting moves on the audience’s perception of
the denigrator and of the denigrated politician. A politician, to perform more effective
persuasion, presents himself in a positive way; in the same vein, to lower the
persuasiveness of the opponent he often tries to cast discredit over him concerning
features like competence (knowledge of relevant facts, planning capacity, prediction
skills) benevolence (morality, honesty, sincerity) and dominance (capacity of winning
in context and influencing others). The authors analyze the multimodal messages
(gestures, face, gaze, prosody) by which politicians discredit each other in political
debates, providing a typology of discrediting moves – insults, accusation, criticism,
haughty attitude – performed by words and body signals.
Negative evaluations are also the bulk of prejudice, which is the subject of
Pellegrino, Salvati & De Meo’s chapter. The authors analyze a typical multimodal
and multimedial case of communication, advertising and TV spots against racism;
their study reveals that, strangely enough, the various modalities and aspects of these
multimodal messages, from the choice of characters to the meaning of sentences, from
register to regional accent, from articulation rate to contradiction between words and
images, while apparently trying to deny and reverse stereotypes and to recommend
Italians to welcome foreign workers, may in fact leak and subtly convey stereotypical
assumptions to the Italian Receiver, proposing only submissive roles for the foreigner.
For instance, the hyper-articulated speech used in the spot unmasks a paternalistic
attitude, while phonation time of characters and specific aspects of the conversation
reveal the strong political and ideological connotation of the spot campaign, actually
issued by a centre-right government.
The Discourse: Structures
Before analyzing some aspects of political discourse, Cedroni presents the principles
of Politolinguistics, a recent research field opened by [35], that combines Pragmatics,
Sociolinguistics, Text Linguistics and Semiotics with the sociological approaches of
Critical Theory and Political Science, to provide a clearer view of how a speech or a
declaration made by a politician or an institutional actor is not only an illocutionary
act but a political action. Thus Politolinguistics integrates Linguistics with the three
dimensions of political science: Politics, referred to the power sphere, and seen as the
capacity to influence political decisions; Polity, concerning the definition of identity
and the boundaries of the political community; and Policy, referred to the political
programs and the process of decision making. By analyzing two samples of the
“language of transition” in Italian politics, the speech “Stop to clandestines” by
Umberto Bossi, the leader of the North League, and the “Agreement with Italians”
signed by Silvio Berlusconi during a talk show, and overviewing some key words of
Italian political identity - homeland, monarchy, republic, and constitution - Cedroni
shows how following the change of political words and discourse allows to understand
more in the change of a country’s politics.
The last three chapters show how a complete picture of political speech can only be
offered by a multidisciplinary approach, ranging from rhetoric to argumentation
theory to corpus linguistics.
On a corpus of stenographic reports of the Italian Senate sessions, Longobardi
analyzes some linguistic and rhetorical strategies aimed on the one side to waken
attention but on the other side to avoid taking a stand, to remain obscure; among these
are markers of group belonging (allocutives, slang, ellipsis, code-switching), inclusive
verbs or pronouns, impersonal reference, indirectness and presupposition of
presumably shared information, nominalization, and metaphors, mainly aimed at
making fun of the opponent. Longobardi compares the idiolects of Berlusconi (as
Prime Minister), and Fassino (as chief of the opposition party), in terms of lexical,
mood and tense choices (e.g., how they speak of the future), but also of rhetorical
devices like repetition. The comparison shows, for instance, how Berlusconi’s
inclusive “we” differs from Fassino’s exclusive “we”, referred only to himself and
his party: “the ‘we’ of polarization, of radicalization of the comparison, whose
objective is to mark one’s distance from the political choices made by the majority”.
But also the formal tenor kept by Berlusconi differs from Fassino’s hybridization of
registers, where the switch from the formal to the colloquial is often exploited “to
mock his rival and expose his thesis to ridicule”.
Zurloni & Anolli overview the major theoretical approaches to the study of
argumentation and investigate the role of fallacies in political debates. They
emphasize the importance of revealing fallacies in political communication, since
fallacies, in their opinion always intentionally misleading, may give rise to deceptive
communication. In the context of a political debate on nuclear energy held in Italy in
March 2011, they examine the informal fallacies used by politicians to persuade the
audience, finding out a most consistent presence of argumentum ad baculum,
argumentum ad hominem, argument from analogy, and argumentum ad
consequentiam. The paper may be seen as a tool for the interpretation and recognition
of fallacious argumentative moves in political speeches, helping readers to single out
erroneous cause-effect argumentations or misleading analogies between incomparable
situations.
Conoscenti, by applying data mining techniques to Obama’s discourse as a
President and as a Senator, examines his use of “sprinkled metonymy”, in which the
classical rhetorical strategy - referring to some entity by mentioning another related to
it - is brought about in a “sparse” way. Obama “describes concepts, ideas, things,
‘indirectly’, by referring to them by means of other concepts, things, as if they were
‘around’ them, in a kind of an informative cloud, linked by specific, but difficult to
identify, causative links. All of a sudden the hearer/reader recognises that an idea has
been ‘installed’ in his mind, without being able to recall when this happened”.
Strangely enough, “this is obtained without using the typical technique of repeating
words”. For example, the idea of “audacity of hope”, mentioned in the title of
Obama’s book of 2006, though running all around the text, is very rarely mentioned
explicitly, and its composing words, “audacity” and “hope” appear with very low
frequency. Rather, Obama utters these words at the very beginning of his discourse to
induce, through the metaphoric frame set by them, his interpretation of facts, and
often underlines this discursive pattern by his typical gesture of closing thumb and
forefinger to form a circle while raising his hand and turning torso slowly. Conoscenti
argues that Obama’s discourse features “can be fully unlocked and understood only if
a variety of analytical techniques are used, either with bottom-up or top-down
approaches”: by using the software LIWC [36], that instead of counting the entries for
a specific word considers the possible semantic networks the word could generate, he
calculates the degree to which different categories of words are used and checks this
against a built-in native dictionary, also using several statistical indexes. Thus
Conoscenti may skip the main bottleneck of data mining, one of being confined to
literal meanings only.
Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’Errico, Laura Vincze, Alessandro Vinciarelli
Acknowledgments. Our research is supported by the European Network of
ExcellenceSSPNet (Social Signal Processing Network), VII Framework Program,
G.A. N.231287.
We are indebted to Roberto Cipriani, who at the time of the Workshop "Politcal
Speech" was the Head of the Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Educazione of Roma Tre
University, for his always welcoming attitude and his open-minded acceptance of
innovative research.
Finally, we want to express our gratitude to Cristiano Castelfranchi for always being a
model to us in the investigation of mind and social interaction, and for his endless
tension toward clarity of thought.
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