Analysis of intonation in news presentation on television

The effectiveness on the television communication is sustained on the handling of voice, which is the base of fundamental expression of the audio-visual contents. Consequently, the audience attention to the television message as well as understanding and assimilating of it, will depend on a correct and expressive use of voice. These reasons guarantee the necessity to make an empirical investigation about the prosody form in which the news broadcasters on television use voice. Therefore, the actual communication is based on the results of a study in order to determine the intonation in broadcasters on television. Overview There are not many empirical investigations about TV broadcaster’s intonation on television. Nevertheless, there is a wide bibliography in Spain which continuously referrers to the lack of effectiveness in the use of prosodic elements of journalists. Both experiments that have been carried out, and bibliographical references agree in signaling that there is a specific way of intonation of TV news which is, paradoxically, not the most appropriated, neither from a linguistic nor from a expressive point of view. In the presentation of news, journalists reproduce one singsong delivery pattern that represents the continuous repetition of a same structure: a circumflex intonation. Method According to this, the actual investigation tries to define the local movements of intonation which are more used in TV news to verify if this type of circumflex intonation in broadcaster’s presentations does really take place. To prove this theory, the superficial phonological level of speech will be analyzed following the Aix-in Provence pattern. The corpus of this research is composed by ninety utterances corresponding to the interventions of six broadcasters on television, fifteen utterances by each speaker, in the different news programs emitted by three main Spanish stations (two programs by a TV station). When selecting the definitive utterances for the analysis, two facts have been taken into account: utterances had to be declaratives and with similar extension. ITRW on Experimental Linguistics Athens, Greece August 28-30, 2006 ISCA Archive http://www.isca-speech.org/archive