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Stance markers in television news presentation: Expressivity of eyebrow flashes in the delivery of news

  • Zhengrui Han and Hongqiang Zhu EMAIL logo
From the journal Semiotica

Abstract

The discourse of broadcast news is shifting toward being more “conversational.” As a consequence, rather than assuming the traditional poker-face style of delivering news on television, news readers as televised personae are becoming more “informal” and “dialogic” in order to better relate to audiences. Eyebrow flashes, as a communicative resource in television news presentation, play an important part in construing the expressiveness of presentation and engaging with audiences. Drawing upon insights from nonverbal communication studies (especially the pragmatics of nonverbal communication) and discourse analysis, this paper explores the pragmatics of eyebrow flashes as a marker of expressivity in news delivery, and the interaction of eyebrow flashes with the verbal context, based on data collected from Chinese broadcast news in English. The analysis shows that eyebrow flashes are widely employed to initiate the theme of the agent in news messages (implicating “I know something”), to emphasize the focus of the news statements (implying “I am thinking now”), and to respond to the attributed statement (indicating “I want to know more”). Therefore, eyebrow flashes function to assist viewers in construing alignment with authors or reporters of news, as well as alignment with audiences. In addition, they serve to distill personal emotion to hybridize the institutional voice of news, thus rendering television news more “watchable” and engaging.

Funding statement: The Humanities and Social Sciences Project, granted by Ministry of Education, China, (Grant/Award Number: ‘[Grant Number: 13YJC740028]’) The MYRG supported by the University of Macau, (Grant/Award Number: ‘[Grant Number: MYRG 133 (Y1-L4)-FSH12-MM]’).

Appendix 1

Notations

CAPITALIZED LETTERS

utterances are heavily produced

:

prolonged sound

underlined words

the occurrence of eyebrow flashes

Grammatical categories notated

NP

nominal phrase

VP

verbal phrase

AP

adjective phase

PP

prepositional phrase

Adv.P

adverbial phrase

MOD*NP

nominal phrase as modifiers

MOD*AP

adjective phase as modifiers

MOD*PP

prepositional phrase as modifiers

MOD*P

participles as modifiers

Det.

determiners (quantification, pronouns, articles)

CONJ

conjunctions

S

sentence

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Published Online: 2018-2-28
Published in Print: 2018-3-26

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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