Intent Analysis for Studying Public Speech, with an Example

Intent analysis (from English intention, i.e. purpose, aim) or analysis of intentions is a theoretical and experimental approach that makes it possible, by studying a speaker's public speech, to uncover the hidden meaning of their utterances, intentions and goals that influence discourse, and that cannot be accessed through other types of analysis.

An intention is a person's purpose

Intent analysis focuses on the intentional characteristics of speech that are directly related to the course of communication. The method enables the researcher to describe both typical and other intentions, including unconscious ones, which are perceived by the participants in communication and constitute the psychological reality of communication. Intent analysis involves the study of natural speech material taken directly from everyday life. For example, by the hidden tape recorder method, in which speech produced during a conversation is recorded on tape or another storage medium and then transcribed according to a special system: pauses, overlapping turns and other features of oral speech are taken into account.

Cognitive intentions: - perceptual intentions represent the psychotherapist's efforts to perceive the client's sensations, feelings and experiences; - operational intentions provide a cognitive understanding of the client's situation; - reflexive intentions reflect the psychotherapist's aim to express thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc. related to the context of psychological counselling and the client's situation.
Dialogic intentions: - contact intentions help establish contact between the psychotherapist and the client; - non-contact intentions interrupt the psychotherapeutic contact.
Helping intentions: - developmental intentions promote the client's development, personal growth and self-actualization; - essential intentions stimulate the disclosure of the client's individuality and the client's acceptance of their essence.

History and content of the method

The method is fairly young and was developed by the Laboratory of Speech Psychology and Psycholinguistics of the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is used to elucidate the inner meaning of political propaganda texts.

The method is based on the idea that socialized adults, when entering into communication, usually do not so much naively express what they think as construct their speech accordingly and strive to achieve goals that are at times complex, are sometimes concealed by the speaker, and, in order to produce the desired effect, hide behind ostensible intentions. A speaker's intentional orientations form a rather complex structure and are aimed at influencing listeners. Moreover, intentions take a variety of forms of expression, which does not prevent them from being organized according to the laws of language in such a way that listeners can perceive their general orientation and also sense different emotional attitudes in the utterances: approval, censure, threat and the like. The study of intentional forms offers a key to understanding the ways in which verbal influence and inducement operate. Therefore, especially in the case of important oral or written speeches, a good knowledge of the rules of the intentional structuring of verbal utterances will be of considerable help to the author of a text and discourse. The intent analysis method is psychosemantic by nature, and hence designed for subjective evaluation of the perceived utterances. The methodological organization of the work consists in a step-by-step evaluation by experts (one or several) of the author's utterances taken from some selected text. The evaluation criteria remain unchanged throughout the study: what prompted a given utterance, what its goal orientation is, and why the speaker needs it at all. At the same time, one must understand that the method is not free of subjectivity and therefore requires careful elaboration. It is therefore best to conduct the study with a group of three or four expert judges. In the event of any discrepancies, this makes it possible to make agreed adjustments to their judgments, and also to obtain additional data on "zones of indistinguishability" or "difficult distinguishability" of intentions. A useful aid may be a working dictionary of intentions compiled on the basis of clear cases. In some cases it is useful to reformulate the utterances under analysis, while necessarily preserving the meaning of the original.

The essence of the method

Intent analysis is aimed at investigating the current state of consciousness. It reconstructs intentions, i.e. the orientation of the speaker's consciousness at the moment of speaking, in an actual communicative situation.

The task of intent analysis

To reconstruct the subtext, "revealing not only what a person formally said, but also what they wanted or meant to say, i.e. the motive and goal of their speech, which determine its inner meaning"

The procedure of intent analysis

The intent analysis method involves the use of mental maps, which in structure are in many respects analogous to semantic spaces.

To create a mental map, at the first stage a set of discussed objects is singled out in the text under analysis. The basis for singling them out is the significance of the objects for the author of the analyzed text

The criterion of significance is the level of detail in the description of an object: all objects with more than two descriptors are singled out (in some cases, to increase the resolving power of the analysis, objects with fewer descriptors may also be singled out)

Example

A text as a means of communication between an author (speaker) and a reader (listener) contains communicative intentions with a two-component structure. The expression of an intention presupposes:

1. The designation of a subject, and
2. The attitude of the author (speaker) themselves toward it

Intent analysis allows the researcher to reconstruct these intentions on the basis of a text, written or oral.

During intent analysis of a text, its qualitative content is taken into account, that is, not what the author is talking about (cf. content analysis), but what they are trying to convey. For example, in the question "Вы еще хотите с нами поиграть?" (Vy yeshchyo khotite s nami poigrat'?, 'Do you still want to play with us?') intentions of threat or encouragement toward the subject may be hidden, depending on the context. Thus the list includes accusations, threats, debunking, counteraction, demonstration of force, encouragement, praise, etc. Intent analysis, as a rule, includes two stages: a) detection of intentions; b) expert evaluation of the intentions underlying the expression. If no obvious intention can be traced, then by the start of the second stage the text is reformulated according to the following procedure:

• Derive the units of meaning as concisely as possible, preserving the logic of the text as far as possible and avoiding undesirable associations in the component parts of the lexical meaning of the units;
• Omit secondary clarifying units and separate them from their content.

As a rule, at the second stage the semantic units are reduced to subject-predicate structures, "propositions" . That is, intent analysis is supplemented by propositional analysis. A proposition is a minimal, well-structured unit of meaning. One sentence may contain more than one proposition. For example, the sentence "Киев поддерживает Грузию в вооруженном конфликте с Россией" (Kiyev podderzhivayet Gruziyu v vooruzhyonnom konflikte s Rossiyey, 'Kyiv supports Georgia in its armed conflict with Russia') contains two propositions:

• Proposition 1 : at war (Georgia, Russia) ;
• Proposition 2 : supports (Ukraine, Georgia) .

As we can see, the nodes of the propositions are predicates (at war, supporting), expressed, as a rule, by verbs. The arguments are Kyiv, Georgia, Russia.

It is advisable to apply intent analysis to texts of a conflict-oriented nature, in particular political and propaganda texts and media texts such as pre-election speeches, since one of the key aspects of this method is the author's evaluation, positive or negative, of the objects described. In an advertising text, by contrast, a negative evaluation of the object (a product or service) is absent. Conflict texts contain a so-called triangle: we – they (in-group – out-group) – a third party. Each of these components is assigned its own characterization. The we block is usually characterized positively, while reproaches, condemnation, threats, etc. are directed at the they block; that is, they represent the enemy/opponent. The third party is ordinary people (the populace), who are either encouraged or reproached by them.

First stage

One variant of the intent analysis procedure, when applied to the kinds of texts described above, is to identify at the first stage the set of objects under discussion, as well as the links and relations between them. The basis for singling out an object is its significance, which manifests itself in frequency, that is, in the level of detail of its description and the number of features (predicates) mentioned.

Second stage

At the second stage, each feature (predicate) is assigned a specific value on the following factors: morality, dynamism, competence.

Final stage

At the final stage, the results are summarized as a list of the most frequently mentioned objects (as a rule, a person or group of people), followed by evaluation on bipolar scales: morality – immorality, dynamism – passivity, competence – incompetence, for example "+1", "0", "-1". Finally, the researcher compares the individual results of the intent analysis with the results obtained by other experts. If the evaluations coincide, one can claim that the procedure is correct and the expert judgments are adequate.

Example 2: intent analysis of a politician's speech

Intent analysis of public speeches by representatives of government bodies

Areas of application

Research by the Laboratory of Speech Psychology and Psycholinguistics of the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences has established that, in face-to-face communication, the interlocutors' intentional state serves to a considerable extent as an indicator of the speech partner and of the current communication. Moreover, together with the intentions that arise in the course of interaction (to answer, to clarify, to confirm), the flow of conversation is also influenced by more general aspirations, which take shape outside the dialogue in connection with the communicants' practical activity. Subjects' intentional orientations are one of the most important psychological foundations on which discourse is then built. To a large extent they determine how and what exactly is said, and how interaction proceeds with a whole audience or with just a single interlocutor.

N. D. Pavlova, analyzing the dialogues of A. V. Karaulov's television programme "Moment of Truth" and comparing the discourses, identified the specific features of the dialogic intentions of the host's interlocutors, as well as their influence on the development of the conversation.

Intent analysis can be used to determine:

• the essential features of the speaker's psychological state;
• the way in which the speaker expresses their varied and changing subjective states (impressions, thoughts, emotions);
• the most significant means of verbally expressing an individual's psychological state;
• the conditions and causes that limit the speaker's ability to verbalize their subjective states adequately and fully;
• the conditions that limit the listener's ability to understand the speaker adequately and fully.

See also

• intention
• discourse
• Content analysis
• Study of psychotherapeutic discourse
• Psychotherapeutic discourse
• semiotics
• Method of dialogic case analysis (E. T. Sokolova, N. S. Burlakova)
• content analysis method
• CCRT method
• Configurational analysis
• Factor analysis