Harmonizing Words and Sounds: The Relationship Between Verbal and Audio Pragmatic Markers in America's Got Talent

This study aims to identify and analyze the relationship of verbal and audio pragmatic markers in communication. Pragmatic markers, both spoken and non-verbal play a crucial role in shaping communicative intent, managing discourse and engaging audiences. This research employs a qualitative descriptive method with a pragmatic and multimodal discourse analysis approach. Data were collected from selected video segments of America's Got Talent judges comment using purposive sampling. The analysis focuses on identifying the forms of verbal and audio pragmatic markers and their pragmatic function within televised interaction. The finding revealed it is important to highlight that the verbal pragmatic markers are not only limited for linguistics expressions such as you know, I mean, uhh and the others because they convey a certain message. Meanwhile, the audio pragmatic markers categorized into falling tone pragmatic markers and rising tone pragmatic markers. Audio pragmatic markers were potential to change the message conveyed in the utterance. The intonation of the verbal markers helped the addressee to interpret the message conveying in the pragmatic markers particularly in the pragmatic markers without linguistics expressions.