A Pragmatic Approach to British and American Entertainment and Celebrity News Reports (Published)
Entertainment news reports are composed of news stories of interest taken from the entertainment industry, about filming and television projects, interviews with actors, musicians and other entertainment personalities and entertainment newsmakers. This type of news aims at amusing the audience and entertaining them by incorporating human interest stories about celebrities’ lives in addition to their activities. Despite the pervasive interest in this type of genre, it has not been thoroughly investigated from a pragmatic standpoint. Consequently, this paper endeavors to pinpoint the pragmatic aspects of the language utilized in British and American entertainment and celebrity news reports. Precisely, this work sets itself the task of answering the following question: what are the pragmatic aspects of this kind of discourse? Accordingly, the study aims at identifying the most prevalent pragmatic aspects utilized in the manufacturing of entertainment and celebrity news reports and finding the interdifferences between British and American news reports of this kind. In accordance with these aims, it is hypothesized that entertainment and celebrity news reporters exploit certain pragmatic techniques such as presupposition, allusion, and conversational implicature to achieve their ultimate goal of attracting as many viewers as possible. In order to achieve the aims of this paper and test its hypothesis, a model is developed for the analysis of the data under scrutiny. Besides, a statistical method represented by the percentage equation is utilized for calculating the findings of analysis. The analysis is conducted on five British news reports retrieved from the BBC online Entertainment & Arts news (bbc.com), and five news reports retrieved from the American TV show Entertainment Tonight (etonline.com). The findings of the analysis verify the above hypothesis in that entertainment news reporters exploit presupposition, allusion, and conversational implicature to help them attract the attention of the audience and take the news report out of its usual frame of boredom into being more interesting, amusing, and entertaining.
Keywords: Cooperative Principle, Entertainment and celebrity news reports, Implicature, allusion, pragmatic aspects, presupposition
A Pragmatic Approach to British and American Entertainment and Celebrity News Reports (Published)
Entertainment news reports are composed of news stories of interest taken from the entertainment industry, about filming and television projects, interviews with actors, musicians and other entertainment personalities and entertainment newsmakers. This type of news aims at amusing the audience and entertaining them by incorporating human interest stories about celebrities’ lives in addition to their activities. Despite the pervasive interest in this type of genre, it has not been thoroughly investigated from a pragmatic standpoint. Consequently, this paper endeavors to pinpoint the pragmatic aspects of the language utilized in British and American entertainment and celebrity news reports. Precisely, this work sets itself the task of answering the following question: what are the pragmatic aspects of this kind of discourse? Accordingly, the study aims at identifying the most prevalent pragmatic aspects utilized in the manufacturing of entertainment and celebrity news reports and finding the interdifferences between British and American news reports of this kind. In accordance with these aims, it is hypothesized that entertainment and celebrity news reporters exploit certain pragmatic techniques such as presupposition, allusion, and conversational implicature to achieve their ultimate goal of attracting as many viewers as possible. In order to achieve the aims of this paper and test its hypothesis, a model is developed for the analysis of the data under scrutiny. Besides, a statistical method represented by the percentage equation is utilized for calculating the findings of analysis. The analysis is conducted on five British news reports retrieved from the BBC online Entertainment & Arts news (bbc.com), and five news reports retrieved from the American TV show Entertainment Tonight (etonline.com). The findings of the analysis verify the above hypothesis in that entertainment news reporters exploit presupposition, allusion, and conversational implicature to help them attract the attention of the audience and take the news report out of its usual frame of boredom into being more interesting, amusing, and entertaining.
Keywords: Cooperative Principle, Entertainment and celebrity news reports, Implicature, allusion, pragmatic aspects, presupposition
A Pragmatic Study of Weather Forecasting Reports (Published)
Weather forecasting is an application for predicting the condition of the atmosphere for a given location; such predictions are based on scientific resources and measurements i.e. factual information. However, these predictions are still assumptions, or forecasting, and therefore changeable. Hence, weather forecasters use different strategies to control the certainty of these predictions and mitigate the accuracy of their forecasting. In spite of the importance of this genre and the type of language exploited in it, it has not received enough research work attention, particularly from a pragmatic point of view. This has prompted this study to carry out such a kind of research work in an attempt to shed light on the main pragmatic aspects utilized in weather forecasting reports. Precisely, the study attempts to answer the question: what are the pragmatic aspects that characterize weather forecasting reports? In other words, the current study aims at finding out the pragmatic aspects exploited by weather forecasters and how these aspects help them control the accuracy of their reports. In accordance with these aims, it is hypothesized that weather forecasting reports, though based on scientific measurements are still changeable assumptions about the future (i.e. predictions). This entails that the forecasters use certain pragmatic techniques to avoid being committed to the accuracy of these predictions. In order to achieve the aims and verifying or rejecting the hypothesis, a model is developed for the analysis of data under scrutiny. Additionally, a statistical analysis is conducted via means of the percentage equation to quantitative support the findings of the pragmatic analysis. The most important findings yielded by those analyses reveal that the main pragmatic aspects utilized in weather forecasting reports are speech acts, presupposition, scalar implicature and hedging, and that predictions are global speech acts in weather forecasting.
Keywords: Speech Acts., Weather forecasting reports, hedges, pragmatic aspects, presupposition, scalar implicature