Multimodal Means of Expressing Emotions in Interviews with Latin Americans about War Advertising: Experience of Multimodal Annotation

The article is devoted to the problem of identifying verbal and non-verbal means of expressing emotions in an oral interview about military advertising. The study is relevant due to the increased attention of linguists to the emotional processes in language and speech, the topicality of military discourse, and the interdisciplinary approach to the study of the linguistic nature of emotions by means of interviewing and multichannel annotation. What makes the work novel is the lack of research on emotional behavior of Spanish speakers in their discussing military advertising. The goal of the paper is to identify verbal and non-verbal means of expressing emotions in oral Spanish-language discourse while discussing military advertising. The material for the work incorporates video recordings of a structured interview with respondents from Latin America that were required to watch a commercial for the Colombian Armed Forces and answer some questions related to the content of the video and the occupation of the soldier. Methodological tools were an interview and a method of multichannel text annotation in ELAN. Multichannel annotation was carried out by means of marking five vocal and non-vocal tiers –“Verbal component”, “Gestures”, “Eye movement”, “Facial expressions”, “Intonation” – with subsequent structuring of the obtained data. Thus, it has been found that the video and military service evoke predominantly negative emotions among respondents – indignation, anxiety, surprise and disappointment. Negative emotions towards the video (disappointment, surprise and indignation) at the verbal level were expressed by lexical units with the common meaning “simplicity/plainness”, metaphorical comparisons with the film, rhetorical questions and negative indefinite pronouns – all emphasizing the lack of content and excessive romanticization of the military sphere, also enhanced by various manual illustrator gestures to express negative emotions and focus on certain semantic segments. The military profession was described through lexical units with the common meaning “risk/danger” and “injury/death”; respondents apparently experienced indignation and anxiety; a reference was made to a precedent situation – the current military-political conflict between Russia and Ukraine represented on a non-verbal level by various illustrator and regulator gestures. The interviewees displayed a feeling of discomfort through adapter gestures, facial movements and intonation, as well as a reluctance to maintain visual contact with the interviewer. Multichannel annotation allowed us to conclude that non-verbal means of expressing emotions can change the connotative meaning of the verbal component of a statement, indicate its untruthfulness and a desire of the respondent to hide their real attitude to the subject of discussion. The prospect of the study is seen in attracting respondents of other age and social groups.