TV News Subtitles: yet another instance of "little texts"
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2005 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Slovak Studies in English 1 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | informative texts; language of news; TV news; little texts |
| Description | The article analyzes TV subtitles that summarize the reported news. It is based on a corpus of 263 subtitles. It looks at the role of printed text in media: the three most recent types of media (teletext, TV news channels, Internet) increased its proportion. The material confirms this tendency: 74.5 % of the subtitles could be used as standalone texts (unlike traditional news subtitles, usually providing only names of people or places). The subtitles share some features with other types of little texts (Halllidays term), e.g, the high proportion of non-finite clauses 43.4 % (40.5 % in newspaper headlines); within this specific category, TV subtitles show a slightly higher occurrence of elipted clauses (82.4 %) and fewer nominal clauses (17.6 %) compared to newspaper headlines (ratio 61.2 % : 38.8 %). Other features found: in syntax the comma replacing and; in semantics frequent presenting of the information source; in style absence of language play and stylistic embellishments. |
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