exploring the intonation of appraised items in one speech by obama: the case of prominence

Tonic prominence marks the information the speaker has decided to highlight or to make the focus of information. as it is, this decision concerns the speaker and it is, to a certain degree, more or less conscious and intentional. for brazil et al. making a word prominent constitutes a meaningful selection. they assert that prominence reflects the speaker's judgement that the word in question contains matter which, at this time and in this context, will be informing (brazil et al., 1980:41; emphasis original). in its unmarked form, the tonic syllable is most frequently located within the last lexical item in a tone unit, a fact which, according to tench (1996) or halliday (1967), is of immense relevance for the structure of the information unit. in discourses in which both the content and characters involved acquire political relevance, forms of (in)direct message take a particular interest. according to van dijk (1997) (political) discourse is understood as a form of action which is frequently intentional, controlled and directed at a specific goal. recognising discourse as a form of action allows us to associate it with purposes directly related to instances of power abuse. for present purposes, we will observe how the location of the tonic syllable (tonicity) contributes to the formation of a manipulative and persuasive discourse (de-)emphasising appraised items as best fits the speaker's purpose. we will then study the function of the nuclear tone in a speech delivered by obama while informing about bin laden's death. the speech has been divided into tone units and prominent syllables have been identified including the tonic ones. results show that the allocation of tonic prominence bears a close connection with those items that are explicitly evaluative by making them either prominent or tonic prominent and by making them non-prominent when interactional conditions were purposefully set. besides, it was found out that, in relation to evoked attitude, intonation contributed to further extend the prosodies of affect and judgement in opposing senses: towards the positive end of affect and judgement when referring to the us and towards the negative end when referring to al-qaeda. that is, they do this mainly by setting up two streams of judgement in the following relation: ideational tokens are mainly used to deploy negative judgements of propriety and veracity (social sanction) to trigger negative affectual responses of insecurity and unhappiness respectively. in addition, they are also used to deploy positive judgements of tenacity or veracity to trigger positive affectual responses of security and satisfaction .