Expressing Uncertainty: A Phono-Lexical Analysis of Weather Forecast in Nigeria

Abstract

Information about the weather is important in everyday living, but weather is inherently unstable and thus creates uncertainty. Meteorologists  therefore have the responsibility to communicate effectively this uncertainty in their weather forecasts. Previous studies have examined how speakers communicate uncertainty in their speeches but not much attention has been paid to how this is done in weather forecasting, especially through lexical choices and prosody. Considering that weather is unstable, the expression of certainty in the forecast is as important as the forecast itself because it is on the certainty or otherwise that people rely to make their daily plans. This paper, therefore, examines how meteorologists communicate (un)certainty in weather forecasts. Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics and acoustic analysis using PRAAT were deployed in analysing thirty-six weather forecasts selected from the YouTube page of the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMET). Findings show that forecasters use varied epistemic modality tools- modal operators, modal adverbs, other linguistic items, metaphor of modality, including other  modal-like expressions to communicate different degrees of uncertainty. The implicitly objective orientation was, however, the most preferred as it afforded the forecasters the opportunity to distance themselves from the truth value embedded in the proposition and by so doing, they present the forecasts as objectively as possible. In addition to the lexical choices, delay (silence) and the rising intonation are also deployed; however, the rising intonation is placed on the word or phrase that constitutes the probable source of uncertainty rather than on the modality marker.

Keywords: Nigerian Meteorological Agency, weather forecast, phonolexical analysis, modalisation, prosody