Temporal organization of American and British radio talk shows on marine topics

Abstract

In the given article the results of the perceptual research of American and British radio programs on maritime topics belonging to the talk show genre are presented. The aim of this work is to identify the differential temporal characteristics that distinguish the analyzed radio talk shows. The object of the research is the oral discourse of radio talk shows on maritime topics as a psycholinguistic and linguistic phenomenon. The subject of the research is a set of temporal parameters of the American and British maritime discourse. The work describes the peculiarities of radio discourse as well as characterizes the tempo indicators of speech in the studied radio talk shows with the help of quantitative, comparative, and statistical methods. The results of the conducted auditory analysis of tempo and pauses in different types of radio talk show on maritime topics testify to the clear differences in the researched variants of the English language. For instance, accelerated tempo and short pauses turned out to be typical of American talk shows, while moderated tempo and average pauses were more common in British programs of the same kind. So, it has been proven that American and British radio talk shows on maritime topics differ by a certain set of parameters. Thus, the conducted experimental phonetic research enabled us to draw the conclusion that the examined radio talk shows differ in both typologically common and specific speech prosodic features. The gained result was confirmed by the results of statistic data processing.