Decoding codas: evaluation in reporter and correspondent news talk

Chapter 5 This study examines linguistic features of the conclusions of correspondents’ and reporters’ prepared, pre-recorded news items across the four corpora of BBC, CBS, RAI, and TG5, comparing mechanisms for the expression of implicit evaluation and the use of argumentative strategies. The chapter includes a brief framing of the role of the correspondent/reporter in the structure of the news programs, a role institutionally and functionally different from the News Presenter/Anchor and from the embedded reporter, and slightly different across the cultural backgrounds of the networks (British, US, Italian). Aspects of the linguistic positioning of correspondents/reporters vis-à-vis both the News Presenter and the audience will be discussed, confirming conclusions drawn in previous chapters regarding the differences in the apparently culturally determined construction of intersubjective relationships between newsworkers and audience. The discourse of correspondents/reporters is examined in order to distinguish the presence and weight of (implicit) evaluative mechanisms specifically in correspondent voice with particular focus on the use of rhetorical, argumentative/persuasive techniques (e.g. contrastive pairs, semantic fields of fear and danger combined with projection forward) some of which show similarities with closing paragraphs of print editorials and comment articles. Results indicate that British and American correspondents/reporters use recurrent linguistic features and discursive functions in the closing remarks of their prepared pre-recorded items (though there are some significant differences between the two English language corpora). Discursively, BBC and CBS ‘codas’ seem to ‘instruct’ the viewer as to why the report has been important, an operation lending weight and authority to the reporter’s voice, further underlined by the type and style of language used. In sum, far from giving closure to the report, the coda projects the viewer forward in time or elsewhere in space, paving the way for a virtual new narrative. The corresponding Italian data appear to call on different linguistic strategies in closing utterances.