Journalistic Speech Research Articles

The journalism of opinion: Network news coverage of U.S. presidential campaigns, 1968–1988

This essay expands the research on sound bites in U.S. presidential campaign coverage by looking at the speech of journalists rather than sources. Using the metaphor of the election report as apolitical conversation among journalists and their sources, the authors apply Bales's categories to discover that journalists have become more dominant, increasing their share of air time in more tightly controlled, faster paced reports. A significant shift toward expressing opinions and judgments of campaign events confirms previous qualitative observations that newscasts have become more journalist‐centered. The focus on journalists and their opinions may turn anchors into celebrities and attract larger audiences, but it provides information less often about the election.

Siglaison-acronymie et néologie lexicale

On observing a corpus of approximately 200 siglas and acronyms, among which nearly half were the homonym unities of proper nouns or existing lexemes, we can bring forth the following conclusions : The modalities linked to their formation cannot be limited to those of written abbreviations, but call for the creation of a sign associating a signifiant and a meaning. In journalistic speech these unities behave as terms. Their semantic value is the sum of the proper noun's identification function and the common noun's signification function. The siglation-acronymy manifests the tension between linguistics anomalies and regularities as do many other contemporary productive neologies.