Estrategias de vinculación afectiva y entonación en un debate político

Abstract

In this paper, we study the elements of public discourse where affectivity is used as a communicative strategy. In particular, we focus on the analysis of affect through intonation in a two-candidate Spanish electoral debate, with two objectives in mind: (i) to measure the speaker’s involvement in his/her speech and in the speech event (the debate), thus establishing a link between certain intonation signals and the speaker’s degree of involvement, and (ii) to compare the results with the news appeared in the media, reflecting the perceptions and opinions on who of the two candidates “won the debate”. Our research is based on previous studies on emotion in language, such as Janney (1996), but also using our own model of study, which we have applied to the study of political discourse (Nieto y Otero, 2012). The methodology used has consisted in the analysis of the linguistic manifestations of affect found in the openings of each of the candidates’ interventions; for the acoustic analysis we have examined three parameters –fundamental frequency, intensity and vocalic duration–, pursuing the initial hypothesis on whether it is possible to find correlations between the two.