A discursive profiling of news values in Ghanaian radio news broadcast

Abstract

Over the past decades, studies on the language of broadcast media have favored patterns of the lexicogrammar over patterns of prosody. The present study examines the patterns of intonation deployed to structure information during news broadcasts by English-medium Ghanaian radio stations and the communicative meaning those patterns are expected to evoke to the listeners. The data for the study comprised two stories: one each from Joy FM’s News Night and Citi FM’s Eyewitness News, on the same event of a suspected case of COVID-19 and were dated March 6, 2020. The study relied on Systemic Phonology and Discursive News Value Analysis (DNVA) as a theoretical lens. Employing a qualitative content analysis, the study revealed that the data were predominantly constructed using complex units, particularly clause complexes and group complexes, a pattern of configuration typical of written texts rather than spoken texts. Another key finding of the study was that the texts were predominantly marked for tonality and tonicity. The information units, on average, were relatively shorter than the clauses, and their integration into the patterns of the grammar realized new forms of meanings and grammatical association. In addition, the tones used to construe interpersonal and logical meanings predominantly derived their associated functional meaning from the lexical items they fell on and/or from their association with other tones from other information units. The major implication of the study is that it supports the claim that a prosodic analysis offers an additional line of interpretation of media texts, which is otherwise lost when focus is given to just the patterns of the lexicogrammar.