• A
  • A
  • A
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
Regular version of the site
  • HSE University
  • Student Theses
  • Multimodal Characteristics of the Comic Effect in Oral Political Discourse. Computer Analysis Based on Russian and English Languages

Multimodal Characteristics of the Comic Effect in Oral Political Discourse. Computer Analysis Based on Russian and English Languages

Student: Peskova Elena

Supervisor: Valery Bukharov

Faculty: Faculty of Humanities (Nizhny Novgorod)

Educational Programme: Fundamental and Applied Linguistics (Bachelor)

Final Grade: 9

Year of Graduation: 2021

The multimodality of ironic phrases in political discourse is attracting considerable interest due to necessity for common people to reveal and understand politicians’ communicative understatements and intentions. Numerous studies have been published on political discourse, the theory of irony and prosody, including fundamental works by T. van Dijk (1997), R.Wodak (2007), S.Kodzasov (2009), O.Ermakova (2017), A.Kibrik (2010). However, the theory of prosody in expressive speech and multimodality of irony have received relatively little scholarly attention, especially in comparing Russian and English languages via computer tools. The purpose of the research was therefore to reveal and compare multimodal characteristics of comical, especially ironical statements which are being released in Russian and English oral political discourse. Complex approach which includes quantitative method for phrases’ counting and qualitative methods as an instrumental analysis via programs Praat and Elan is applied to the present work. Fragments from Russian and English political talk-shows have been extracted over the period of three years (2019-2021) as a material for the study. The practical part of the research included the manual extraction of ironic phrases from political talk-shows and questioning of Russian respondents and English-speaking experts to check if the phases are truly ironic. Then the selected utterances were analyzed by computer tools and some tendencies were revealed. The results of the research concern the pitch, intensity and pause characteristics in politicians’ speech. Both English and Russian politicians tend to divide ironical part and other part of the phrase with hesitation pauses and to pronounce the ironical part slightly slowly and quieter than the whole sentence. The pitch and intensity characteristics are varied. Multimodal aspects such as proxemics and oculesics are variative and include the use mimics mostly by English politicians and demonstrative gestures by Russian politicians. Proxemics gestures are restricted by the format of talk-show. An annotated corpus of oral speech was created and can be useful for future experimental studies. The present study is supposed to help politicians and their consultants in writing successful political public statements.

Full text (added June 1, 2021)

Student Theses at HSE must be completed in accordance with the University Rules and regulations specified by each educational programme.

Summaries of all theses must be published and made freely available on the HSE website.

The full text of a thesis can be published in open access on the HSE website only if the authoring student (copyright holder) agrees, or, if the thesis was written by a team of students, if all the co-authors (copyright holders) agree. After a thesis is published on the HSE website, it obtains the status of an online publication.

Student theses are objects of copyright and their use is subject to limitations in accordance with the Russian Federation’s law on intellectual property.

In the event that a thesis is quoted or otherwise used, reference to the author’s name and the source of quotation is required.

Search all student theses