On the specificity of rhythmical organization of modern news reader's speech (on the material of TV news programs)

This paper studies the peculiar properties of rhythmic organization, which includes the description of rhythmic devices and their percentage, basic principles of their arrangement. The study defines reading of pre-written text as a main characteristic of news reader's speech. We used tapes of the popular TV news programs which were broadcasted by the main Russian channels in 2000 as a material for this research. The study describes rhythmic devices of different language levels. Quantitative analysis helped to make the conclusion about the predominance of super-segmental devices in news reader's speech of 2000. For example, lexical rhythmic devices amount to 6 %, syntactic rhythmic devices amount to 8 % and the number of super-segmental rhythmic devices reaches 86 %. This article characterizes the main principles of super-segmental rhythmic devices arrangement, such as symmetry and proportion. Structural dependence exists in rhythmic organization of news reader's speech. The feature of structural dependence consists in regular reproduction of rhythmic devices in the initial and final parts of information announcement and partial reproduction - in the central part. Semantic, expressive, arranging and composition functions are the basic functions of the rhythm in news reader's speech; moreover, the semantic function which helps to mark certain words important in terms of information, dominates in news reader's speech of 2000. We noticed the dominance of using high degree rhythmically arranged information announcements, which are characterized by using different language level rhythmic devices in more than 50 % of syntagmas of sounding text. Consequently, rhythmic organization of news reader's speech reflects displacing of argumentative way of verbal influence by the suggestive way of verbal influence as a current trend in modern communication.