A Diachronic Analysis of Face-to-Face Discussions: Berlusconi, Fifteen Years Later

How has Berlusconi's speech changed, in fifteen years of political life, during his one-to-one TV debates? Here are the results of a diachronic analysis carried out on the suprasegmental features of Berlusconi's speech in some of his political face-to-face discussions, in relation to the main factors that characterize political communication and social, historical and institutional variables of the period the communication is produced in. For the purposes of our research, within Berlusconi's debates, common themes have been identified, so that the selected speech samples could be compared on the basis of a same theme and the same speaker. We have carried out a diachronic comparison through the detection of rhythmic-prosodic features, namely articulation rate, speech rate, tonal range and fluency. The data derived from the analysis have been discussed in detail and compared to data already available in literature concerning the Italian politicians' electoral speech in the 90s.