Intensity in the spoken news

Abstract

The intensity is the third of the prosodic parameters in the oral expressiveness —along with the intonation and the rhythm. It has had little academic attention in the field of social news communication given the great diffi culties of analysis and its connection to basic emotions. Nevertheless, not only there is a tendency to speak news with some emotion, but there is a specific intensity modulation for the TV news. This «discursive function» of the intensity (referential and structural) is contrasted and described in the article by means of an acoustic analysis of 12 units of news from three different styles of locution.