The position assumed by the speaker in verbal communication is a topic that is constantly at issue in the scientific community, paving the way for ever new lines of research in many disciplinary fields.
The topic has been of particular interest within the domain of voice sciences, in which an increasing amount of research has been dedicated to the linguistic and paralinguistic resources that speakers employ to assert their (pre)-(dis)position and attitude towards others in the management of conversations.
Speakers not only seek the best way to achieve their communicative goals, but they also construct themselves as individuals, by employing particular types of discourse strategies. Hence, the systematic covariation between phonetic details and specific pragmatic functions does not merely depend on instrumental needs related to the efficiency of the interaction, but it also conveys speakers’ positions and attitudes, reflecting their individuality and group identity.
The conference offers an opportunity to share new research experiences concerning various aspects of speaker disposition, investigated from a variety of perspectives and disciplinary traditions. Therefore, and in line with the topic of the Round Table "Hate speech and media" organized in synergy with AItLA, we invite contributions on phonetic and prosodic aspects related to:
- The disposition of speakers towards the interlocutors and social groups
- Pragmatic mechanisms such as mitigation, attenuation, intensification, linguistic politeness
- Conversational mechanisms of turn management, discourse markers, interruptions, overlaps, etc.
- Position of the speaker on the epistemic-evidential axis with respect to his own subjectivity and to the interlocutor
- Specific communicative goals
- Emotions of the speaker
- Communicative situation
- Relationship between interlocutors in human-human and human-machine interactions
In line with the tradition of the AISV conferences, proposals of studies "on a free topic", concerning any aspect of voice research, will also be welcomed.