The contribution investigates the role of gestures and body language (including facial expressions) to meaning-making in political interviews, distinguishing between female and male styles. For this purpose, a multimodal approach is used to carefully analyse the joint interview with President Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on the CBS News programme 60 minutes that aired in January 2013. In particular, the analysis makes some distinctions between typical female and male non-verbal behaviours and evidences the association between gestures and body movements with the linguistic elements identified as typical concomitants of gender-related language use. To this end, comparisons are drawn between Clinton’s and Obama’s speech and those of other female and male politicians during interviews by referring to two small self-compiled comparable corpora. Finally, both Clinton’s and Obama’s gestural behaviours in this interview are contrasted with the gestural styles of other politicians in the same genre, with a view to identifying their peculiar traits.
Gender-related Communication in Political Interviews: A Multimodal Analysis in Meaning-Making in the Obama/Clinton Interview of 2013
BRUTI, SILVIA
2016-01-01
Abstract
The contribution investigates the role of gestures and body language (including facial expressions) to meaning-making in political interviews, distinguishing between female and male styles. For this purpose, a multimodal approach is used to carefully analyse the joint interview with President Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on the CBS News programme 60 minutes that aired in January 2013. In particular, the analysis makes some distinctions between typical female and male non-verbal behaviours and evidences the association between gestures and body movements with the linguistic elements identified as typical concomitants of gender-related language use. To this end, comparisons are drawn between Clinton’s and Obama’s speech and those of other female and male politicians during interviews by referring to two small self-compiled comparable corpora. Finally, both Clinton’s and Obama’s gestural behaviours in this interview are contrasted with the gestural styles of other politicians in the same genre, with a view to identifying their peculiar traits.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
