Prosodic markers of satirical imitation
Leymann,Saskia Lentz,Tomas Burgers,Christian
Leymann,Saskia
Lentz,Tomas
Burgers,Christian
Abstract
Satirical imitation is a popular format of late-night comedy shows and can provide political entertainment and education. However, little research has been conducted on how satirists mark their satirical intent to clue audiences in on their intended messaging. This study investigates the prosodic marking of satirical imitation and contrasts it with prosodic marking of irony. We conducted a detailed case study of the prosodic marking in Alec Baldwin’s satirical imita- tion of Donald Trump in his audiobook You Can’t Spell America Without Me contrasted with both Baldwin’s and Trump’s regular voices. The analyzed corpus contained six hours of audio material across the three sources. Through a combination of automatic and manual coding, we measured average pitch, pitch variation, and speech rate. Our analysis did not reveal marking of satirical imitation by pitch or pitch variation. The satirical imitation was only marked by a faster speech rate than both baseline voices. These findings contrast with pre- vious studies that identified a lower pitch, less pitch variation, and a slower speech rate as markers of verbal irony. Our study provides first evidence that satirical imitation is prosodically marked differently from verbal irony, with a faster speech rate as one potential marker.
Description
Funding Information: The authors have no known conflict of interest to disclose. The contribution of Saskia Leymann was supported by an Interdisciplinary Doctorate Agreement (IDA) Grant from the University of Amsterdam. The contribution of Christian Burgers was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, Vidi grant 276-45-005). Publisher Copyright: © 2022 De Gruyter Mouton. All rights reserved.
Date
2022-09-23
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Research Projects
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Keywords
Irony, Political Satire, Prosody, Satirical Imitation, Satire Markers
Citation
Leymann, S, Lentz, T & Burgers, C 2022, 'Prosodic markers of satirical imitation', Humor, vol. 35, no. 4, 2021-0138, pp. 509-529. https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2021-0138