ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of oral delivery in conveying meaning an element of audio description (AD) that is often limited to discussion of broad categories such as accent and gender. It has deconstructed the role of prosody, including stress and segmentation, pace, pitch and tone, fluency and pronunciation, all of which aid in establishing the describer and the description as trustworthy and authentic. Reference has been made to the work of Michel Chion and parallels drawn between the describer and the media norm of the acousmetre. Stress or emphasis is the basis of rhythmic structure in a language. It is an important tool for the describer. Stress is fundamental to meaning making. Inappropriate stress can alter the meaning of a sentence, even though the words remain unchanged. In spoken English, rising intonation at the end of an utterance is typical of questions but can also suggest that a statement has still to be completed.
