| old_uid | 4098 |
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| title | The persuasive role of gaze in political discourse |
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| start_date | 2008/02/15 |
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| schedule | 10h15-11h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The importance of body behaviour in persuasive discourse has been acknowledged since traditional Rhetorics to recent research on multimodality. However, the communicative modalities that have been more systematically studied for their persuasive role are gesture and speech. In this work I want to show how gaze communication has a relevant place in persuasive discourse, and how the persuasive impact of gaze is strictly determined by its meaning. I first present a model of communicative gaze according to which the items of gaze constitute a lexicon, that is, a codified list of signal-meaning pairs, and show how each item of this lexicon can be analysed both on the signal side – by finding out the values that each gaze item has on various physical parameters – and on the meaning side, by singling out the meanings of each item in its occurrences and by finding the invariants of them (Poggi & Roberto, 2007). Then I overview a theoretical model of persuasion in terms of goals and beliefs (Poggi, 2005). According to his model, persuasion is an act aimed at social influence, through which a Persuader A wants to induce a Persuadee B to pursue some goal GA, but, different from other cases of social influence, from education to threat, promise, or the use of strength, is a kind of social influence 1) that is pursued through communication, and 2) that leaves B free of either pursuing the goal GA proposed by A or not. To persuade A must convince B that GA is worth pursuing, and can do so through the three Aristotelian strategies of logos (logical arguments), ethos (the Persuader’s reliability) and pathos (the emotions the Persuader can evoke or induce in the audience). A persuasive communicative act can exploit different modalities: we can use words, intonation, gestures, gaze, facial expression, posture, body movements, thus making multimodal persuasive discourses that, as any discourse, can be analysed (according to Poggi, 2007) as plans, hierarchies of goals, in which each single communicative act – even each gesture or gaze item – can bear its specific contribution, pursuing its specific logos, ethos or pathos strategy, to convey a global persuasive meaning. After showing how to analyse persuasive discourse in general, I will focus on the specific relevance of gaze for the persuasive strength of multimodal discourse. Some fragments of political persuasive discourse will be presented, drawn from the electoral debates of Romano Prodi and Ségolène Royal before elections in Italy (2006) and France (2007), and an analysis of their gaze, and of its interaction with the concomitant gesture and speech, will be proposed. An annotation scheme will be illustrated for the transcription and classification of gaze in political discourse, and some fragments of the debates will be analysed, trying to classify and measure the persuasive strength of different speakers’ gaze. References: Poggi I.(2005): “The goals of persuasion”. Pragmatics and Cognition 13: 2, pp.297-336. / Poggi I.(2007): Mind, hands, face and body. A goal and belief view of multimodal communication. Berlin, Weidler 2007. / Poggi I., & Roberto E. (2007): “The eyes and the eyelids. A compositional view about the meanings of Gaze”. In E.Ahlsén, P.J.Henrichsen, R.Hirsch, J.Nivre, A.Abelin, S.Stroemqvist, & S.Nicholson (Eds.), Communicaion – Action – Meaning. A festschrift to Jens Allwood. Department of Linguistics, Goteborg University, Goteborg, pp. 333-350. / Poggi I. & Pelachaud C. (2008): Persuasive gestures and the expressivity of ECAs. In I.Wachsmuth, M.Lenzen, G.Knoblich (eds.): Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines. Oxford, Oxford University Press. / Poggi I. & Vincze L. (2008): Persuasive gaze in political discourse. AISB 2008, in prep.. |
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| responsibles | Faraco, Bertrand |
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