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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 480

Part of Session 155: Changing linguistic norms in the audiovisual media (Other abstracts in this session)

Changes in linguistic style as a consequence of changing media norms. Final syllable reduction as an indicator of ‘conversationalization’?

Authors: Thoegersen, Jacob (1); Heegård, Jan (2)
Submitted by: Thoegersen, Jacob (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

In sociolinguistic theory, ‘style’ refers to intra-personal variation, i.e. changes in language as a consequence of the genres and activities a speaker is involved in and the interlocutors she interacts with. ‘Style’ has been described as a unidimensional scale dependent on ‘attention to speech’ (Labov 1972), as fundamentally a consequence of the interlocutor, whether present or imagined (Bell 1984), or dependent on a whole range of contextual variables (Hymes 1974). When dealing with media language, it is tempting to redefine the concept of style to mean ‘the variety used in a particular genre’, e.g. ‘news reading style’.
This paper investigates changes in the ‘style’ of news reading in the Danish national public radio’s program 1 over a span of 8 decades (1936 – 2010), a total of approx. 6 hours of transcribed news readings. We are particularly interested in the articulation, and potential reduction, of final syllables in adjectives, verbs and past participles. Danish has minimal sets with the ending -et vs. -ede (e.g.”male” (“to paint):  “malede” (verb past tense), “malet" (past participle) and “malet”/”malede" (adjective singular/plural)) and -te vs. -t (“læse” (“to read”): “læste” (verb past tense), “læst” (past participle) and “læst”/”læste” (adjective singular/plural)). In ‘informal’ styles, the longer endings, -ede and –te, almost obligatorily undergo syllable reduction making the sets homophones ending in [əð] and [d]/[t] respectively.
We assume that the national media in Europe is undergoing a change in media norms, from ‘public enlightenment’ to ‘infotainment’, and as a consequence a re-interpretation of their audience, seeing them as consumers in a free market. We want to investigate whether these changing media norms lead to changing audience design (Bell 1984) and analogously whether we can spot tendencies along the lines of what Fairclough calls ‘democratization’ (1992) and ‘conversationalisation’ (Fairclough and Mauranen 1998). Previous studies (Thøgersen in press) have shown a general increase in speaking and articulation rate in the news readings, which we take as individual evidence for a degree of ‘conversationalization’ and which we hypothesized would also lead to an increase in syllable reduction.
In order to investigate whether such a possible ‘conversationalization’ is expressed by phonetic means, we constructed an experiment in which we listened to all occurrences of potential homophones of the above mentioned types in the corpus of radio news readings and evaluated their articulation (n≈2200). The results show a tendency for an increased degree of syllable reduction, but nowhere near what we could expect from contemporary corpora of ‘spontaneous’ spoken Danish (DanPass and the Lanchart corpus). We conclude that the news reading style is changing towards more informal style, but that it is still a distinctly ‘unreduced’ style More surprisingly we have almost as many evaluations of “-t” pronounced [də] and –te pronounced [əðə], i.e. the opposite tendency of syllable reduction. In our paper we will discuss the reasons for this; specifically whether it is an artifact of the experimental method, or a consequence of listeners’ preconceptions about the style. This will raise questions of more general implications for diachronic studies of language change.