2020
№ 1
(Vol. 7)
The work is devoted to the identification of differentiating textual signs of frustration as a reaction to subjective inability to satisfy a need. The linguistic realization of frustration in the texts of network communication is considered as emotive speech and is a useful tool for diagnosing emotional well-being both at the individual and at the group level. The data of a psycholinguistic empirical study carried out using the methods of artificial intelligence are presented. Texts of 100 social networks users were analyzed: posts and comments had been written in different emotional states — while calm and in frustration. Texts were processed using a linguistic analyzer that can automatically detect 177 text parameters. Clustering on the basis of changes caused by frustration in the measured text characteristics revealed the existence of two clusters of users. The first cluster encompasses people whose texts, under the influence of frustration, reveal an increase in the proportion of singular past tense verbs, 1st person verbs, and 1st person pronouns, the frequency of “pronouns-nouns,” the coefficient of action objectification (number of verbs relative to the number of nouns) and the number of punctuation marks relative to the number of words. The second cluster includes people whose texts reveal an increase in the frequency of nouns and words in the semantic role of predicate, and for the average word length, but a decrease for indicators from the first cluster. It is concluded that there are two linguistic patterns of frustration response: the “story about one’s own actions” and the “story about the case circumstances.”
2020
№ 1
(Vol. 7)
The article discusses the modeling of behavioral scenarios and methods for their extraction from texts published in social media. The authors proceed from the basic (in modern cognitive science) position that the intentional aspect of a person’s behavior is reflected in his speech activity. This gives reason to extract scenarios from the texts generated to carry out some activity. The choice of instructive texts is determined by the fact that their genre, content and communicative intentions of their authors most explicitly represent the program of human behavior. In this article we propose several methods for automatic construction of behavior scenarios, as well as a scenario model in the form of a frame. This model can be used in the system for automatic extraction of scenarios from texts and their further implementation. We describe an experiment on automatic scenario identification in texts and its results. The experiment includes text segmentation after which each segment is associated with a particular step of a scenario. Text segmentation involves dividing a text into semantic units, selecting the most important of them, which express (by their lexical meaning and form) incentive modality, and finding some details to these units. In psychological terms, this means that we extract those segments that contain description of some goals and particular actions that lead to their achievement. Reconstruction of the scenario in this case can be represented as automatic extraction of goals, actors, actions and conditions from selected segments. The result of text segmentation achieves a fairly high F-measure.
2020
№ 1
(Vol. 7)
Demotivator is considered as a new network media genre, involving in its orbit advertising, logos, political caricature on the basis of common genre characteristics and the same stylistic dominant — ironic modality. The media properties of demotivator are analyzed: utilitarianism, topicality, polycode, intertextuality, inclusion in the actual media discourse and social evaluation. This text is secondary to the corpus of media texts. The latter is seen as a discourse, the lower tier, the context, the reaction to which becomes a demotivator: thus the audience of the media reacts to the current agenda of the media Implicating one actual ideology of the media discourse, the demotivator expresses its assessment by the society. Regardless of the material medium, the demotivator is a modular text with the properties arising from this quality. First of all, it is laconism, which is achieved in the image by visualization of the main details of the media narrative, stereotype or frame; intertextuality, the predominant implicitness, and in the verbal part of its compliance with the principles of the newspaper headline: brevity, aphorism, brightness, simplicity, the ability to implicate the theme and problem of the text. The stylistic dominant of the genre is an ironic comprehension of reality; expressive means are a linguistic and visual game, often based on a metaphor of the bodily, biological and linguistic bottom. The author compares the traditional point of view regarding demotivator as a genre of network creativity of Internet users and the results of the study, in particular, prove that the genre remains polycode, even if it presents only the visual or only the verbal part, since in both cases there are cognitive parallels in the encoding of information.
2020
№ 1
(Vol. 7)
The article is an attempt to analyze the phenomenon of tabloidization of court proceedings’ reports on gossip websites — websites whose constitutive features are, among others, the scandalization and dramatization of disseminated messages. Using media reports about the accusations and court case pending against Kevin Spacey, which were made available on TMZ.com (United States) and Pudelek.pl (Poland), an attempt was made to determine how media workers present crimes related to their judicial conduct and how such representations can affect the perception of justice by recipients. The base of considerations was the social constructivism and framing theory. As a result of research, it was discovered that: (1) gossip websites’ editorial teams use the interpretative frame of the cruel world to cover criminal matters, including the narratives of an absolutely evil attacker and innocent victim, which enables the creation of a dramatic, and at the same time extremely attractive to recipients, opposition; (2) crime-related texts on gossip websites are closer to commentaries and assessments of the presented crimes than to actual reporting on court proceedings; (3) typical editorial measures used to build tension in the gossip materials about court proceedings are to report only those stages of the proceedings that can be provided with emotional comments, constant recalling of negative information about the crime that arose before the trial, the use of flashy and unambiguously negative headlines, and reminders of the highest penalty for the described act; (4) geographical proximity of the described events or the represented media market do not affect the manner in which gossip websites cover court proceedings.
Keywords: celebrities, gossip journalism, tabloidization, violence, знаменитости, насилие, сплетни, таблоидизация
2020
№ 1
(Vol. 7)
The article deals with the interstate relations between Russia and Bulgaria, reflected in the modern Bulgarian media. The article deals with the topics that affect the historical relations between Bulgaria and Russia, namely the Russian-Turkish war of 1877–1878, the The article deals with the interstate relations between Russia and Bulgaria, reflected in modern Bulgarian media. The article analyzes the topics that affect the historical relations between Bulgaria and Russia, namely the Russian-Turkish war of 1877–1878, the liberation of Bulgaria from fascism at the end of World War II and the socialist development of Bulgaria in the period 1944–1989. Attention is drawn to the division of civil society into Russophiles and Russophobes and their interpretation and attitude to the mentioned historical events, which found a place in the media. The authors’ materials are examined, which have a polar attitude to the interpretation of Russian-Bulgarian relations. The most striking cases of a negative attitude are given. The reasons for the negative assessment on the pages of such newspapers are closely related to the different interpretations of Bulgarian history and its relationship with Russia over the centuries. The stylistic aspect of the empirical material is considered, the stylistic methods used by the authors to express their attitude to the subject of speech are highlighted. Social and political practice proves that the attitude to Russia is dictated by ideological rather than pragmatic attitudes. Analysis of the material illustrates that several newspapers have a sharply negative attitude towards Russia and the Russians. In the linguistic aspect, these newspapers use invective vocabulary and, in general, they are characterized by the creation of the image of the occupier and the enemy in the face of Russia. Such an attitude is in sync with the actions of Russia’s enemies on a European and global scale. However, sociological studies and mass media practice in modern Bulgaria indicate that in the public space the image of Russia remains close to Bulgarians.
2020
№ 1
(Vol. 7)
The article studies Theresa May’s communication activities during the Brexit process and the communicative strategies she uses. The author analyses her speeches at conservative party congresses, addresses to the nation, participation in parliamentary debates, official letters, as well as mass media publications on the dynamics of the negotiation process between the British government and the EU negotiators. The communicative strategies T. May employs in her activities are analyzed to reveal a correlation between the success and failure of each communicative act. The changes in the character of communicative strategies are studied as far as the attitude of British establishment and general public to changes in the government’s Brexit policy. The analysis of the communicative strategies used in implementing her Brexit policy both internally and externally makes it possible to reveal the factors facilitating or preventing the success of a communicative act. For the purpose of a complex pragmatic analysis of the communicative acts, both oral and written messages of the participants as well as the addressees’ responses to them are analyzed semiotically. The communicative strategies T. May used within the country, in most cases, did not match the pragmatic context and resulted in failure while the strategies used in negotiating with the EU were adequate to the pragmatic intentions of both parties and resulted in signing a Brexit deal. Besides, failure in her communication within Great Britain is due to the dissonance between the internal and external communicative practices utilized by T. May that prevented the parliament from approving the deal with the EU and successfully achieving strategic goals of the government, i.e. orderly Brexit and preserving the unity of the conservative party.
2020
№ 1
(Vol. 7)
The article is devoted to the identification of linguistic ways of representation of negative assessment in the conceptual and semantic sphere of “healthy lifestyle”. The aim of the study is to establish and analyze the most typical means of expressing the subjective value-evaluation attitude of the subject of speech-blogger to specific components of this sphere. The Internet discourse seems to be the widest communicative and pragmatic space, which provides a rich material for the study of the axiological space of language. As a multifunctional communication channel and a special socio-cultural and communicative environment, it determines the special use of language tools in dynamically developing media genres. The material of the analysis is the blogosphere. 160 texts of users of the blog platform “LiveJournal” (“LiveJournal”) for 2016–2019 were analyzed. The pragmatic attitude of the blogger is the desire to Express his thoughts, evaluative attitude to various phenomena in order to get a response in the form of comments from readers. Evaluation is an important category of pragmalinguistics and is considered through discourse analysis. A certain value significance of the objects of reality for the subject of speech reflect the units of discourse. Various ways of representation of a negative assessment in such units (words, phrases or whole statements) are established. The first group includes creative names of people who lead a healthy lifestyle, as well as createmes that reflect a specific model of behavior and views of adherents of this lifestyle. The second group of ways to convey a subjective assessment in a negative way are common language lexical and morphological means, which include adjectival characteristics of persons leading a healthy lifestyle, and verbal predicates, calling them typical actions. All the established methods are United by the pragmatic intention of the subject to strengthen the impact on the reader, causing negative emotions to the conceptualized object by destroying stereotypes.
2020
№ 1
(Vol. 7)
The article presents the study of the addressee of modern media discourse. The author considers the communication model of information interaction between people, which is dominant in digital media. This model is characterized by the activity of the audience, for which the media world often becomes the only reality. This caused a blurring of the media discourse boundaries, as a result of which the verbal reaction of the addressee, previously observed mainly in everyday communication, goes into the media discourse. The segmentation of the target field proposed in the article, which includes all participants in the media discourse, takes into account the intention of the participants in communication. Cognitive intention determines the addressee’s role and communicative intention realizes the author’s potential. Interactivity does not imply a clear separation between the addressee and addresser, which is observed in natural communication. Communicative intention is inherent in the author of the message. Being implemented in media discourse, communicative intention provides the author with the status of the subject of constructing media reality and is one of the important parameters of the segmentation of the addressee field. Depending on the communicative intention, two types of addressees are distinguished in the address field, i.e. repeaters and non-repeaters. Repeaters are involved in the construction of the media reality. Professional and non-professional repeaters, as well as institutional entities, stand out in this segment. The first ones are journalists who are recipients of objective reality and recipients of media reality and transmit information further to the addressee field. Unprofessional repeaters are citizen journalists that create their own content and interpret previous massages. The third subgroup includes social groups that have gained access to a mass audience and are interested in saturating the mass consciousness with the “right” news. The intension of non-translators does not imply their verbal reactivity in the media discourse. In this segment of the address field, there have been selected positive recipients that are configured for a productive perception of media content in order to obtain certain information and negative recipients with their prejudice that inhibits the selection of facts at the stage of perception and, therefore, the adaptation of the world picture to a changing reality.
2020
№ 1
(Vol. 7)
The author analyzes popular legal discourse in the English language mass media and pays attention to its essential features and specific language. It is significant nowadays to conduct language studies in the field of Internet communication due to the ongoing process of digitalization of all aspects of human and social life. In the course of the research three types of English language legal TV programs are described: court room talk show, journalist investigation, criminal and police documentaries. The author analyzes several episodes of the most typical shows of every type. It is discovered that they all do not contain popular legal discourse and are aimed at entertaining the audience (rather than informing). The shows have legal matters as the subject and they are easily understood by ordinary lay people, but it is not correct to call them explanatory. Most of the shows contain semi — legal and legal information, which can be practically useful. The author also examines English language legal discourse on the Internet to compare it with the shows mentioned earlier. He focuses on the most visited websites and assesses explanatory texts on the topic of landlord — tenant relationship. The article contains examples of two texts on the topic. The first one is from a private legal firm`s website (USA), the second was taken from the official Victoria state legal aid website (Australia). A number of popular legal discourse features are explored and several specific language features are described. The author makes a number of conclusions about the essence and language characteristics of legal TV shows and website texts.
2020
№ 1
(Vol. 7)
The article poses and substantiates several important problems related to media linguistics and culinary media text. It is proven that media linguistics at the present stage of development of media communications should certainly turn to the study of culinary media text. As the study illustrated, this is due to a complex of reasons. Firstly, it is the rapid and multidirectional development of culinary media text in the media space. Secondly, it is the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon scientific tradition in the formation of the conceptual-categorical apparatus, approaches and methodology for the study of culinary media text. Thirdly, by the fact that a culinary media text imperceptibly, but powerfully manages social and everyday desires, goals, dreams, actions and orientations of a person immersed in the plexus of economic, ideological, social, everyday, media communication. Both man and society are addressed in their specific cultural language, appealing to the help of rhetorical figures, codes, signs, techniques to the system of backgrounds, knowledge funds, emotional-sensory sensations and audience memory. In connection with this state of affairs, the proposed article is staged. The goals and objectives are due to the fact that culinary media text is a kind of iceberg of modern media communications; it is what a researcher should be guided by. It must be taken into consideration that only at first encounter does it appear to be one of the varieties of a relatively simple, genre, stylistically, discursive, rhetorically uncomplicated text from the point of view of a communicative situation. However, the understanding and research of culinary media text should initially involve an encounter with a complex, multidimensional, and provocative, referentially voluminous media statement. Inherent in it is a long, stable, strong social, collective, national, historical, cultural, everyday memory and diverse opportunities for influencing a person and society, which, at first glance, are hidden behind a simple, pretty, unpretentious everyday phenomenon. In this regard, one more problematic field is clearly revealed: the formation and justification of a single conceptual-categorical apparatus of media linguistics for determining the phenomena associated with culinary media text.