“Intonation and emotional framing in political rallies:A multimodal approach to populist political speech”

This article examines how intonation functions as a mechanism of emotional framing in political speech. Drawing on a multimodal analysis of campaign rally fragments from Donald Trump and Barack Obama during the 2016 U.S. election, the study investigates how prosodic features—pitch contour, tempo, pausing, intensity, and voice quality—shape affective alignment and ideological positioning. Using acoustic analysis (via Praat) and discourse-pragmatic interpretation, the article identifies distinct prosodic strategies that frame reassurance, attack, and collective emotion. Trump's delivery is characterized by steep pitch falls, high intensity, and compressed tempo, projecting certainty and control. Obama, by contrast, employs rising–falling contours, tonal modulation, and slowed tempo to model emotional co-presence and reflective unity. These patterns reveal contrasting affective logics of leadership: one performative and populist, the other dialogic and compositional. The article contributes to prosodic pragmatics, political communication, and affect theory by demonstrating how intonation operates not merely as an expressive overlay but as a core semiotic system for constructing political meaning in real time. • Analyzes prosody as a key modality for emotional framing in political rallies. • Compares intonational strategies of Trump and Obama in live campaign contexts. • Demonstrates how pitch , tempo , and voice quality shape affective alignment. • Uses acoustic phonetics and discourse pragmatics to model vocal performance. • Offers new insights into the role of intonation in populist and institutional rhetoric.