The language of radio news in Auckland a sociolinguistic study of style, audience & subediting variation

Abstract

Linguists have distinguished two dimensions of language variation according to extra-linguistic factors: social and stylistic. While the social dimension has been described in terms of measurable speaker characteristics, researchers have failed to isolate the variables which affect style shift. Style has been treated as an independent variable rather than one axis of linguistic variation. I examine and reject the proposal that style shift correlates with amount of attention paid to speech. A survey of research in sociolinguistics and social psychology shows that addressee characteristics are the main influence on style shift. A style model should reflect the fact that intra-speaker differentiation derives from and mirrors the social, inter-speaker differentiation of language. I present a general style model which hypothesizes that a speaker shifts towards the dialect of his addressee. News style is an advanced case of such accommodation. Section II develops a model of mass communication which suggests that differences in news style correlate with mainly participant variables. The language sample consists of all news broadcast on Auckland's radio stations on five days. A random survey was conducted into the characteristics of the stations' audiences, and a sub-sample of newsreaders was surveyed. In Section III I present a linguistic analysis of the process of subediting. All Auckland radio stations receive a common overseas wire service, so I analyze and compare treatments of one shared wire story. Subediting can be described by rules which convert one surface structure into another. Subediting rules are formally similar to ordinary linguistic rules, but also perform information deletions and lexical substitutions, and reverse previous rules. Subediting rules function to shift the input copy frequency of a linguistic variable towards the station's own probability for that variable. I also investigate subediting inaccuracy, where a subeditor applies rules which falsify the meaning of input copy. A gatekeeping study of the degree of accuracy of different stations shows some bias, and serious inaccuracies in many overseas news items. Section IV examines five linguistic variables: consonant cluster reduction, intervocalic T voicing, auxiliary and negative contractions, and a rule unique to news English - determiner deletion in appositions. One well-established linguistic constraint on cluster reduction proved to be absent, but a new constraint was discovered. All linguistic variables correlated strongly with audience characteristics, with stations ranked linguistically according to the social ranking of their audiences. The correlation was primarily with standard audience prestige as measured in the audience survey. Phonological variables were also influenced by a secondary audience variable of covert local prestige. BBC news style functions as prestige norm for N.Z. English. The styles of several newsreaders who read on two or more stations differed consistently according to the different audiences of the stations. The one social motivation of gaining audience approval influences both news style and style shift in one-to-one communication. News style co-varies primarily with audience variables, and only secondarily with speaker characteristics. It is the extreme case that illuminates factors operating less obviously in everyday speech.