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Gesture, Gaze and Persuasive Strategies in Political Discourse

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Multimodal Corpora (MMCorp 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5509))

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Abstract

The paper investigates the use of gesture and gaze in political discourse, and presents an annotation scheme for the analysis of their persuasive import. A model in terms of goals and beliefs is illustrated, according to which persuasion is a case of social influence pursued through communication in which the persuader aims to influence the persuadee to pursue some goal while leaving him free to adopt it or not, and arguing how that goal is in the persuadee’s interest. Two studies are reported on electoral debates of three politicians in Italy and France (Achille Occhetto, Romano Prodi and Ségolène Royal), and an annotation scheme is presented through which the gesture and gaze items produced in some fragments of political discourse were analyzed as to their signal and their literal and indirect meanings, and classified in terms of the persuasive strategies they pursue, logos, ethos or pathos. The results of the two studies are presented, showing that the pattern of persuasive strategies found in the meanings of gesture and gaze of each politician is coherent with either the persuasive structure of the specific fragment analyzed or with the politician’s general political strategy.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento. di Scienze dell’Educazione, Università Roma Tre, Via del Castro Pretorio 20, 00185, Roma, Italy

    Isabella Poggi

  2. Dipartimento di Linguistica, Università di Pisa, Via Santa Maria 85, 56126, Pisa, Italy

    Laura Vincze

Authors
  1. Isabella Poggi
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  2. Laura Vincze
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Deutsches Forschungszentrum für künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Campus D3.2, 66123, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Michael Kipp

  2. Laboratoire d’Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l’Ingénieur (LIMSI-CNRS), BP 133, 91403, Orsay Cedex, France

    Jean-Claude Martin

  3. Faculty of Humanities, Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 140-142, 2300, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Patrizia Paggio

  4. Computer Science, Human Media Interaction, University of Twente, PO Box 217, 7500, Enschede, AE, The Netherlands

    Dirk Heylen

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Poggi, I., Vincze, L. (2009). Gesture, Gaze and Persuasive Strategies in Political Discourse. In: Kipp, M., Martin, JC., Paggio, P., Heylen, D. (eds) Multimodal Corpora. MMCorp 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5509. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04793-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04793-0_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04792-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04793-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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