Prosodic strategies in the professional speech of Jéssica Senra: the emphasis on telejornalism

Abstract

Television remains as a relevant means of communication in relation to consumption, preference and public confidence, according to the latest Brazilian Media Survey, and has mandatory informative programming, that is, by law, television is required to set aside time to show journalistic content. The most common journalistic format is television news, in which there are usually one or more presenters who introduce reports and are responsible for communicating with the public; these presenters are usually journalists or communicators who use professional speech as a working tool in the presentation of the news. Professional speech is a style of speech which has its own prosodic characteristics; among the prosodic characteristics present in the journalist's professional speech style, which may be particular to the speech style or used as a stylistic resource, there is the emphasis. From the meeting of perceptions about journalism and television, prosody and professional speech and the event of the change of the station of the journalist Jéssica Senra, who left the affiliate of RecordTV in Bahia, TV Itapoan, and started to integrate the TV journalism team Bahia, an affiliate of Rede Globo in the state, we elaborated our research problem. The guiding question of the research seeks to understand whether there is a difference in the pattern of prosodic strategies for using emphases by the journalist Jéssica Senra between her presentations in Bahia Meio Dia and Bahia no Ar. prosodic achievement in the use of the emphasis feature, between her presentation of the television news Bahia no Ar and that one of Bahia Meio Dia, which makes the presentation less aggressive after the change of broadcaster. The general objective of our research was to investigate the prosodic characteristics of the speech of the journalist Jéssica Senra in the presentations of Bahia Meio Dia and Bahia no Ar, seeking to assess whether there was a change or adaptation of the prosodic pattern of the journalist's emphases when leaving a TV newscast for the other. For this, we analyzed 23 occasions for the presentation of the journalist's TV newscasts, which included the two TV newscasts presented, four editorials, climate, culture, sports and police, as well as three time frames in each of the TV newscasts, beginning, middle and end. The analysis was transcribed by the journalist's speeches; annotation of the emphases perceived in each of them; creation of a typology which categorizes the emphasis according to motivation; classification by type; acoustic analysis of the fundamental frequency of emphases; creation of categorization by General Emphasis Composition and classification by General Emphasis Composition. Our results allowed us to understand the emphases according to the categories created, but there was no significant difference between TV Itapoan and TV Bahia.