Multimodal organization of prosodic and non-verbal means in parliamentary political discourse

this article is devoted to the theoretical understanding of the multimodal organization of parliamentary political discourse. The aim of the study is to clarify the conceptual framework of multimodal analysis in relation to political communication, as well as to describe typical configurations of interaction of verbal, prosodic and non-verbal components in parliamentary debates. The theoretical basis of the work is modern Russian and foreign studies of multimodality and political discourse. The article discusses criteria for identifying prosodic and kinesic parameters relevant to the description of rhetorical impact, and also substantiates the need for a corpus approach to parliamentary speech. Special attention is paid to the complex interaction of prosodic and kinesic means: it is shown that the prosodic complexes “pitch frequency + sound intensity” and “pitch frequency + sound intensity + syllabic duration” most often correlate with accentuating gestures, marking the key meanings of the utterance. A comparative analysis of the British and German parliamentary traditions makes it possible to interpret differences in the degree of expressivity, bodily involvement, and intonation variability as a manifestation of national and cultural beliefs about acceptable forms of public confrontation and norms of political polemics. It is concluded that the multimodal analysis of parliamentary discourse has significant potential for further linguistic and perceptual research.

political discourse, parliamentary rhetoric, multimodality, prosody, nonverbal communication, gesture