We demonstrate the important role of prosody used in rhetoric development during courtroom discourse. Our study is based on real-life examples of prosecution and defence speech taken from a documentary film about French courts. In addition to the well-known syntactic, semantic and attitudinal functions of intonation, we attempt to show how prosody is linked to the argumentative strategy used by the speaker in order to persuade the audience with both a global discourse and internal level of utterances.
Index terms: Prosody, Legal speech, Phonostyle, Rhetoric
Cite as: Kim, I., Mathon, C., Boulakia, G. (2010) Rhetorical prosody in French courtroom discourse. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 080
@inproceedings{kim10c_speechprosody,
author={Inyoung Kim and Catherine Mathon and Georges Boulakia},
title={{Rhetorical prosody in French courtroom discourse}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 080}
}