Politolinguistics through Spoken Language Processing: A Methodological Framework for German and Italian Political Speeches

This paper presents the methods used for the doctoral project of the author, which aims to combine politolinguistics with spoken language processing. The purpose is to offer a methodological framework that can be used for further studies on political spoken language. The illustration of the methods used for the doctoral project shows how politolinguistic analyses can be enriched by selected tools of the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals (BAS) and how Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) can be a suitable option to relate prosody with politolinguistic units of analysis using a large corpus of political spoken language involving two different languages (i.e. German and Italian). Eventually, despite the limitations of this pilot methodology, the paper lays the foundations for future studies which can further improve the framework. The exploratory character of the methodology, which binds quantitative and qualitative research, paves the way to further improvements and application in the field of politolinguistics.