Phonetic Attributes of Political Discourse

Abstract

The paper focuses on phonetic characteristics of public speaking in British English representing political discourse. Public speaking, especially by professional public speakers – leading State figures intends not only at providing essential information but also at convincing the audience of certain standpoints and affecting it emotionally. Accordingly public speeches require adequate phonetic means to achieve the effect; they pertain both to segmental and supra­segmental levels of speech, including intonation. The aim of the present analysis is to register ways by which a State figure attains the impression of prominence within the framework of publicistic style of intonation, mostly the use of nuclear tones, pausation and realizing function words as stressed segments.

The material of the analysis includes a speech by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron on life chances in the UK (t = 41 23), delivered on 11 January 2016. What contributes considerably to the expressive potential of the style is a regular usage of one of the falling tones in non-final tone units, a relatively high percentage of high falling tones, the use of a special rise, variation of the pause length, prominent function words, segmentation of an utterance into tone units of different length according to the interpretation of the piece of information, and the speaker’s voice timbre.