Prosodic characterization of theme and rheme foci in news.

Abstract

The study of prosody with regard to the paralinguistic function is progressing in two areas, the discursive analysis of the information structure, and the prosodic analysis of textual categories. On one hand, the oral information discourse in the media is an established exemplary type of discourse thus its analysis is patterned-oriented. On the other, the news locution is a still a sort of an announcers’ challenge due to the most peculiar communication conditions of the act. This study analyses a corpus of five news announced in three television channels by three different news readers. First, the discourse segments are defined as theme and rheme units. Next, the new, old and meditated information foci are spotted. And lastly, it is measured the pitch range (in percentages), the duration of the stressed syllable and the pitch peak of a corpus of 228 foci. The ANOVA factorial analysis characterizes the rheme focus by the syllable lengthening and characterizes the mediated focus by the pitch peak. These global features are stressed or nuanced by the announcer’s personal style. Whereas the spontaneous style does not make a great use of the pitch peak and is centered on the duration structure to mark the news information, the sensationalist style applies the pitch peak to all three types of accents, and the standard public style marks the rheme focus with duration and the discursive focus with the pitch peak as a turning point of the global melodic contour.