Pathos at the service of persuasion in parlamentary discourse. A case study

Parliamentary discourse is subject to the three persuasive strategies Aristotle's Rethoric pointed out: logos, ethos and pathos. This article tackles the third one, which is devoted to appeal to the receiver's emotions. For that purpose, I will analyze a range of speeches by deputy Ana Maria Oramas Gonzalez-Moro (Grupo Parlamentario Mixto and representative of Santa Cruz de Tenerife) at the Spanish Congress of Deputies within the last term. I will pay attention to the strategies related to the selection of vocabulary, syntactic structures, and, especially, the prosody that she employs to achieve her persuasive objective. For this last aspect, an acoustic analysis of the speeches will be performed thanks to the Praat programme, which will allow us to examine the variations in the speaking rate and pauses, as well as the fundamental frequency, loudness and duration, depending on the more or less heated speeches that Oramas develops on the different situations.