Professional speech: accentual and junctural style in radio announcing

This thesis presents a comparative study of radio announcing intonation, contrasting intonation in the private speech of radio announcers with, their professional, 'on air' intonation, and comparing the intonational styles of different genres of radio announcing - newsreading, information announcements, live commercials, fine music announcements and popular music announcements - as well as the styles prevailing in a number of Sydney radio stations, including both commercial stations (2SM, 2KY, 2CH and 2GB) and non-commercial stations (.the ABC and 2JJ). -- A method for the auditory analysis of intonation is developed and tested, and then applied to a corpus of radio announcing speech, recorded specially for this study, and comprising the varieties of speech outlined in the previous paragraph. -- Chapters 3 and 4 investigate two major aspects of intonational style, accentual and junctural style. A quantitative analysis first establishes stylistic differences in the amount of accents and junctures placed by radio announcers. A linguistic analysis then establishes to which degree the placement of accents and junctures is governed by grammatical rules and to which degree it can only be explained pragmatically. An acoustico-phonetic analysis finally reveals some aspects of the physical realization of the accents and junctures. -- Throughout the study intonational style is interpreted functionally and related to the purposes of the varieties of radio speech included, to the assumptions radio stations make about their audiences, and to the ideological values which underlie the practice of radio in its different manifestations.