Left/Right Polarity in Gestures and Politics

Abstract

In this article we investigate how political actors involved in TV debates during the 2009 and 2014 presidential elections in Romania manage the relationship between handedness (left/right polarity in hand gestures) and political orientation (left/right polarity in politics),. For this purpose we developed a multimodal analysis for some relevant sequences during these debates. The practice of integrating the meanings of different semiotic resources allows a better understanding of the meaning of verbal discourse, actions and behavior of political actors involved in a particular communication situation. In addition, the Multimodal Professional Analysis Tool, ELAN, allows the annotation and dynamic analysis of the semiotic behavior of the political actors involved in the analyzed sequences.

The multimodal construction of political personae through the strategic management of semiotic resources of emotion expression

“…In a previous article, we discussed the persuasive effect of such co-speech gestures exhaustively (Drăgan 2022). The relationship established between hand gestures and the emotional dimension of messages or the emotional valence of the message was also discussed in another paper (Drăgan 2018).…”