Indexicals in Television News Broadcast

Abstract

This work investigated the use of indexicals in television news broadcast. Indexicals are expressive words that signal the appropriate use of information in text. They serve to point to objects, personalities and ideas particularly in television news broadcast. This paper therefore aimed at examining the characteristic indexicals used as text creating linguistic features in news broadcast. The corpus for the study consists of news bulletins of TV Gotel, Yola, Adamawa State- Nigeria. Four bulletins broadcasted within the month of August, 2012, were randomly selected from the television. The method of data analysis was descriptive. The findings show that indexicals are significant features of television news broadcast. Pronoun indexicals point at personalities and topics, while adjectives describe events, and adverbs point at times and manners in which such events occur. The paper, suggests that practicing journalists and students of mass communication should be encouraged to use indexicals as they write, report and cast news over the television.

Key words: indexicals, bulletins, news broadcast, deixis.