METHODOLOGY OF EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE INTERPLAY OF VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL MEANS IN THE CHARISMATIC SPEAKER’S PUBLIC SPEECH

Abstract

The article presents the programme and methodology of experimental phonetic research for the interplay of lexico-grammatical, prosodic and paralinguistic means in English public speeches of charismatic leaders. The relevance of the work is dictated by the need to develop methods, as well as conceptual and terminological apparatus for conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, sociology, political science, physiology, etc. The author puts forward a programme of experimental research into the interplay of verbal and non-verbal means in the public speech of charismatic speakers, consisting of seven consecutive steps. The criteria for selecting and forming a corpus of experimental material, in particular, public speeches of American and British political and religious leaders, are presented; the principles of auditory analysis of the language material by auditors-informants are substantiated; the key intonational parameters of the auditory analysis of prosodic characteristics of charismatic leaders’ public speeches by auditors-phoneticians are determined; a number of typical features for analysing verbal means in speeches of charismatic public figures are developed; the most significant non-verbal means of charisma actualisation are identified; the methodology of acoustic analysis of charismatic speech characteristics is introduced. The author of the article provides an example of generalisation and presentation of the results of an interdisciplinary study of the interplay between verbal and non-verbal means in charismatic personalities’ public speeches on the basis of classical methods of experimental phonetic research of invariant models and variant realisations of emotionally coloured expressions, taking into account the results of non-verbal means accompanying non-verbal ones from the point of view of the modern speech energetics theory. An example of graphical representation of intonation means, documentation of the interplay of lexical-semantic, syntactic, stylistic and paralinguistic means on the material of Boris Johnson’s speech is also proposed.