Prosodic Features of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Debates | ||||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||||
| Article 1, Volume 79, Issue 1, July 2022, Page 3-41 PDF (2.08 MB) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2022.265684 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
| Fakhry Muhammad Al-Sayed Elieba | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| From the second half of the twentieth century until now, American presidential debates have become a prominent event of the political rally. Prosodic features including tone, stress, and intonation are main instruments to convey the unspoken intended meanings of the presidential candidates to the addressees. This is because these features are characteristics of syllables and prosodic phonology of spoken utterances. In the 2020 U.S. presidential debates, the two candidates are Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, and Democratic nominee, Joe R. Biden. Jr. Both spare no effort to utilize these features powerfully to express either the emotional states or the attitudes. The purpose of this study is to analyze the 2020 two American presidential debates through the examination of three prosodic features, stress, tone, and intonation revealed across the two presidential debates between Trump and Biden. In addition, it points out these prosodic features can reflect the emotional states and attitudes’ utterances of the two American presidential candidates and how the addressees can recognize and react to the influential prosodic features employed by the two candidates. Ubiquitous existence of these features clarifies the form of the spoken utterance, such as declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory. Moreover, the two candidates attempt to convey the tone of satire, emphasis, contrast, and focus…etc. These features may not be echoed grammatically or lexically, but prosodically. Hence, this paper examines how two American presidential candidates attempt to employ some prosodic features to make their addressees support and sustain their political agenda. Prosodic features can be identified when sounds are amalgamated in connected speech as a means of communicating appropriately. The two presidential candidates employ their own techniques of these prosodic features to persuade their addressees to adopt their beliefs revealed through their two public debates. In turn, these features also allow the addressees to recognize the leading personality of the candidates. The significance of the current study lies in the questions of how consistently the prosodic features are exploited by the two American presidential candidates to realize their emotional states and attitudes, and to what extent the addressees can identify and recognize the message contained in the prosodic features utilized by the two presidential candidates. Furthermore, the outcome of this study using qualitative statistical analysis, clarifies the reason why Biden managed to persuade most Americans to vote for him. Additionally, Praat software program is employed for voice aspects analysis to classify the candidates' emotional states and their intended attitudes. Voice aspects analysis regarding intensity, pitch height, duration or formants can reveal anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, and sarcasm. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Prosodic features; Presidential debates; Intonation; Pitch; Stress; Tonic syllable | ||||
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