On the mediation of class, race & gender:

Intonation on sports radio talk shows

Daniel Lefkowitz

Sat. 11:00-12:40 C

This paper looks at the role of prosody and intonation in the negotiation of social identities in a sports-talk radio call-in show. Analysis of tape-recorded interactions between hosts and callers on a nationally syndicated radio program will demonstrate the ways in which variation in linguistic form is used to negotiate social identities. This paper will show how such interactional achievements of identity mediate public discourses of race, class, and gender in American society.

Interactive talk-shows play an increasingly significant role in American media, as social, political, and moral issues are publicly debated on popular television and radio shows. Paralleling this growth in talk radio, is the growth of sports talk shows. Discourse about sports has recently exploded into public consciousness, with Magic Johnson's HIV infection, O.J. Simpson's murder trial, and the 1995 baseball strike. These media events, through their implication of AIDS, family violence and labor relations, have dramatically shown that class relations, racial tensions, and gender identities in American society are worked out in discourse about sports. The medium of talk radio is a powerful force both in shaping and contesting public consciousness, and this paper describes the linguistic mechanisms central to this process.

Data for this study come from tape-recordings of listener call-in shows aired on Albuquerque's AM sports-talk radio station. Intonational patterns are analyzed instrumentally, using pitch-tracking software implemented on an IBM-compatible personal computer. The meaning and function of these intonational forms are elaborated through analysis of the interactional and discursive context within which the forms are used.

Preliminary findings indicate that hosts manipulate their prosodic style to evoke black, working class and masculine identities, and that this interactional achievement functions to establish discursive authority. Investigation of the intertextual meanings generated by such stylistic variation illustrates change and transformation in American discourses of gender, race, and class. The discourse of sport in the U.S. is of crucial importance because prominent cultural images, such as masculinity, health, power, success, and free enterprise are metaphorically represented, and thereby mediated through sport.