Dare voce all’insulto. Osservazioni prosodiche introduttive

The pragmatic and communicative strategies of impoliteness speech acts, and among these of insults, have been investigated several times; diversely, little attention has been paid up to now to the analysis of prosody. With special reference to Italian language, the prosodic features of insults have never been examined. This explorative research aims at analyzing the prosody of Italian insults adopting a spectro-acoustic approach. It used data for oral role plays realized by six theater actors; this first step analysis focalized only on personalized negative vocative insults. The purpose is to investigate to what extent intensity and pitch range activate in order to convey that specific meaning of invasion of the hearer’s acoustic space. According to the first data obtained, insults were characterized by a high intensity and a slowed speech rate. The pitch range of the target utterances was instead narrowed, since the f0 values were mostly placed on high frequency range