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.