Emphasis in professional journalistic speech: description of functions, prosody of speech, and visual aspects

Abstract

This work investigates the implementation of emphasis, as a prosodic strategy, in the professional speech of journalists, in the specific context of the speech of the journalist Jéssica Senra, presenter of Bahia Meio Dia, a news program on TV Bahia. To answer our guiding question and verify the hypothesis, the objective of the work is to describe the realization of the journalistic emphasis in the professional speech of the journalists investigated, with the speech of the journalist Jéssica Senra as central and the speech of journalist Silvana Freire as a comparison parameter. The description of emphasis in this work involves listening to the corpus, annotating and checking emphases, classifying perceived emphases according to function, motivation, and acoustic performance, classifications proposed by Rodrigues (2021). In addition to the auditory parameters, visual aspects which allowed understanding the expression of emphasis through the body are analyzed. The parameters observed are Action Units, Eye Movements and Head Movements, codified by Ekman and Friesen (1976), manual gestures and spatiality of the gestures, classified by McNeill (1992) and visual categories such as framing and other diverse body movements. In this work, in addition to carrying out the emphasis, the public’s opinion on the use of speech made by the journalists investigated is investigated, forms centered on questions which give guidance to the volunteers are aplied so that they classify parameters linked, mainly, to the clarity of speech, use of emphases and gestures and identification with the journalists’ speech. The results derived from these phases of the investigation begin with the number of emphases, in which it was verified that Silvana Freire used more emphases in a shorter period of time. In addition to the number of emphases, emphasis is observed from two points of view: in relation to the speech context, which allows us to infer the function and the motivation for the use of emphasis, and in relation to the acoustic realization of the emphasis, which allows us to observe the variation of f0 printed in the emphasis, and how much this variation occurs in relation to the values immediately before and after the emphasis; these results present a journalistic emphasis which has specific functions coherent with the professional context and achievements which vary, but whose motivation for the variation cannot be determined. In relation to the results of the investigation of the gestures made during the broadcast of emphasized excerpts, specific gestural marks of the journalists can be seen in the facial movements; in the number of gestures the journalist Jéssica Senra shows greater use per analyzed video. The public's judgment reveals that prosodic aspects of the journalists’ professional speech are observed and considered by them and that the preferences are based on characteristics such as identification and positioning. In the public’s judgment, aspects judged as less positive include the use of facial and body movements. These results help to understand emphasis as a prosodic and expressive resource, the way it is used in the professional speech of the journalist Jéssica Senra and how expressiveness is received by the audience.