Il parlato dei mass media: analisi multilingue del parlato dei telegiornali

The results of experimental surveys carried out on a corpus of spoken Italian on
both radio and television show unequivocally that the rhythmic-prosodic
characteristics of the speech used on radio and television news programmes have
changed radically over the past fifty years. Several studies show certain marked
changes that indicate a well-defined direction. It must be pointed out that the
changes involved do not relate to the text of the utterance, but to the way it is
delivered (articulation rate, speech rate, fluency, silence percentage and tonal
range). Do the rhythmic/prosodic changes relate only to Italian, or, because of mass
means of communication, are they true of other languages? Do different language
systems share the same model of rhythmic/prosodic patterns? Can we be said to be
approaching a global type of speech? The results of this experimental research
carried out on television information speech in Italian, English, French, Slovenian
and Japanese show a surprising parallelism in the development of these languages.
In fact, the television news speech of the 1960‟s and up to the mid-1970‟s, compared
with television news today, shows less speech rate, longer pauses, a lower level of
fluency, an intonation trend which is less varied, and minimum differences in rate of
articulation. In particular, the data reveal that recent television news, in all the
languages analysed, are characterised by a drastic diminishing of the percentage of
silence as compared to past ones. Fluency too, though in a different way, shows a
net increase in today‟s television news. Another interesting fact common to all the
television news broadcasts is the stability of the articulation rate. The fact is that the
television news is read by professionals, the articulation positioning must be
precise, the target audiences must be reached and the speaker must be clear and
unambiguous.