TV live reporting: a pilot study in contrastive genre analysis

This shows that they have no difficulty delivering their reports fluently, which is a basic requirement for TV correspondents.

Finally, with a speech rate of 100.17 words per minute, pauses appeared to be within the normal range. They ranged from 709 milliseconds to 169 milliseconds. Most of them are due to breath taking, which adds to the fluency factor discussed above.

6. A comparison between the two corpora

At the lexico-semantic level, the two corpora exhibit many differences. TV live reports delivered in English tend to be full of hyperboles, such as `all' and `many. This renders Geis's (1987) remark applicable to the English corpus only. Moreover, Arab correspondents prefer to relegate spatial proximity to the background of their discourse by relying much more on the indexical ^fj*(i.e. there) at the expense of the use of the Arabic first person pronouns. This stands in sharp contrast with English and Englishspeaking TV correspondents, who overuse the pronoun `I' at the expense of the indexical `there'. There is also a very narrow gap between the use of jVl al'an (i.e. now) and munthu (i.e. since, then), which can be placed within the context of temporal proximity: the TV Arab style of reporting live may be one that does not lay much emphasis on the immediacy factor as a significant component of the TV live report. As for English TV live reports, it appears that the sense of immediacy as characteristic of TV live reporting is not much more prominent than spatiality, i.e. the total number of `now' occurrences is less than the total number of `there' occurrences. English TV live reports also exhibit a much more informal style of speaking, since the use of official posts and the connector `and' most of the time is not conspicuous in the present English corpus as compared to the Arabic corpus, where official posts assume a high rate, i.e. 12 times, while j wa (i.e. and) is used 120 times. In terms of lexical density, on the other hand, the Arabic corpus appears to be more informative than the English one.

At the syntactic level, both corpora share the feature of lengthy sentences, since the English corpus is divided into 127 sentences while the Arabic one is divided into 99 sentences. However, mean length of Arabic sentences by far exceeds that of the English ones, namely 35 for English and 111 for Arabic. Moreover, operating with fewer connectors, Arabic correspondents tend to use more non-sequiturs than English and English-speaking ones, a feature that Geis (1987) preserved for English correspondents only, since his study focused on English news. As for the use of voice, both corpora include more occurrences of the active voice than the passive voice, which indicates that TV correspondents prefer to sound better informed and trustworthy, thus giving a sense of authenticity by citing the precise doers of the actions in active and passive sentences most of the time. The same is true for the use of present-referring verbs, where the present time frame is much in focus, compared to the past time frame. However, the sub-category of non-finite verbs is more recurrent in the Arabic corpus than in the English one, thus constituting half of the former.

As for the generic structure of the texts, it is obvious that English and Englishspeaking TV correspondents follow an orderly way of presenting their data. The English texts examined start with a move that places the event within its temporal, spatial or opinion-centered context or setting, or sometimes fusing two or three types together.

This serves as a stepping-stone for the listener, unlike the Arabic texts, which rarely introduce the event: they delve directly into the narrative. The same is true for the endings in the Arabic corpus: the abrupt end shocks the listeners into discovering that the text has ended, unlike the English listener who is given a recapitulation of the main event.

Finally, the prosodic features exhibit more similarities than differences between the two corpora. Both correspondents start their narrative by a rising intonation pattern, perhaps to alert the listener. However, the English correspondents then signal certitude and finality by adopting either a falling or level tone, while Arab correspondents quickly relax their intonation pattern by opting for a level tone devoid of any emotions. As for pauses, the two corpora have similar pause length, yet the speech rate of the Arabic corpus could have saved the Arab correspondents many of these pauses, being highly normal, i.e. 100.17 words per minutes, as compared to the very fast delivery rate of the English and English-speaking correspondents who adopt a rate of 130.09 words per minute.

Conclusions

It can be concluded that TV correspondents whether speaking in English or Arabic seek to provide truthful, concise and detailed accounts of the events they attempt to cover. In doing so, they are obliged to follow certain generic or sub-generic features that are tailored to their media needs. They are therefore required to utilize their lexico-semantic resources in order to reflect reality in an immediate, spontaneous manner that impinges on their ability to select the most appropriate strategic moves in their on-the-spot coverage. However, when doing so in English, they are obliged to deliver their accounts as informatively as possible, given the tight time limit that usually does not exceed 6 minutes. They try to maximize the use of first person pronouns that reflect the fact that they are reporting from the scene. They also tend to use hyperboles to some extent. Due to these difficult circumstances in media coverage, they try to speak with 130 words per minute (normal speech rate being within 100--150 words per minute) and end up using lengthy sentences, which are only broken by breath-taking pauses. The same is true for Arab correspondents, though they consciously or unconsciously strike a balance between first person pronouns and indexicals that designate distance.

In both corpora, as analyzed electronically and manually, the correspondents appear to be creating an atmosphere of excitement by starting their reports by rising intonation patterns. However, they cannot keep that tone for a long time, and either resort to level routine delivery or attempt to project a certain attitude through a falling tone. English or English-speaking correspondents follow a generic structure that is similar to academic English writing (Oshima and Hogue, 2006), where a spatial, temporal or opinion-centered setting is provided first (as an introduction), then comes the detailed body of narrative then finally the recapitulation (or conclusion). Arab correspondents in the present corpus, in contrast, directly go to the specifics of their reports, leaving the listeners without any trace of an introduction, and likewise clinch their reports abruptly by addressing the presenters.

It is important to note that the present study is limited to twenty TV reports: ten in English and ten in Arabic. It does not also deal with the role of the presenter and the deployment of power as manifested in how presenters manage the flow of the dialogue in the interlocution. It is a study that uses a relatively small-sized corpus, but it offers an analysis of TV live reports as a distinct sub-genre--a subject that has not received due scholarly attention in terms of linguistic investigation.

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Sources

English Corpus

1. Al Jazeera English NewsHour 15:00 GMT Monday Oct 07--13. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2oE_WNNlGsU

2. Al Jazeera reporters on Gaza-Israel conflict. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByQMhWenz1Q

3. BBC World News -- Live report on Syrian refugees. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- xamksy1VcU

4. Exclusive: ISIL strikes with chemical warfare as PressTV reporter explains situation in Tikrit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-b8zuzCzBo

5. France floods: Seine river hits critical 6-metre mark in Paris, could rise to 6.5 m. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIBa5nsB6Qs

6. Press TV's reporter covers the ongoing operation in Tikrit. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v= 1YdDwxW0Q6Y

7. Reporter: Al Jazeera told me to ignore Syria intervention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= zWBADsK_7YE

8. Reporter sneaks into `sterile' zone of Marseilles stadium ahead of Euro 2016 match. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caukUtPKb2c

9. SYRIA Aleppo battle -- BBC reporter embedded with sunni djihadists and Al-Qaeda members. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEHewnGuwl8

10. Terror arrest: Detainee had planned string of attacks to coincide with Euro 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7AEjGZGUd4

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