Dare voce all’insulto. Osservazioni prosodiche

Most studies on impolite speech acts focused on pragmatic strategies, leaving out the analysis of prosody. This explorative research aimed at analyzing the prosody of Italian insults adopting a spectro-acoustic approach. Data from 15 role-plays realized by six theater actors and eliciting negative vocative insults were considered. The purpose was 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.