The role of prosodic and nonverbal means in organizing the pragmatics of political discourse
The article aims at defining the link between prosodic and nonverbal characteristics of political discourse in conjunction with the lexical component of the utterance, analyzing their role in forming the pragmatics of political discourse, and defining the way politicians influence the potential electorate. The topicality of the research is provided by the experiment carried out within the framework of multimodal linguistics, which is currently of great interest to researchers. The academic novelty of the study lies in the attempt to consider the pragmatics of political discourse in terms of co-functioning of prosodic and nonverbal means. The impact of nonverbal communication during the information age is in the focus of scholars as an essential part of many areas of modern life. Political discourse, having a high communicative value, is mainstream audience oriented. TV speeches and interviews with politicians are becoming increasingly popular. United by one topic - Brexit, eight TV interviews with prominent British politicians constitute the material of the research. The narrow corpus of the research comprises 200 sense-groups, the analysis of which included a complex method of audiovisual analysis, visual analysis of politicians' nonverbal behavior, and instrumental analysis. A lexical analysis has also been carried out, as a result of which the most significant lexical items have been distributed into certain topics. The obtained data has led to the following conclusions: the most communicatively important lexical units are characterized by the highest fundamental frequency; prosodically marked words are in 100% of cases accompanied by accentuating gestures, the most frequent of which are hand gestures, head and body movements; female politicians are more inclined to use accentuating head and hand gestures, male politicians tend to use head and body movements; female politicians demonstrate vivid facial expressions, including eyebrow movements and rounded eyes; smile in some instances emphasizes the idea of self presentation, in other occurrences it may demonstrate an attempt to conceal true emotions. Thus, the complex interplay of prosodic and nonverbal characteristics in conjunction with the lexical component is used by the addresser to inform, to persuade the electorate; it contributes to the formation of mass consciousness; influences the process of decision-making performed by the addressee; allows to trace the semantic dominants in interviews with politicians.