General characteristics of American magazines

(based on the material of “Reader’s Digest”)

The magazine “Reader’s Digest” is an international, world’s most widely read magazine, over 27 million copies in 19 languages bought monthly. The magazine is aimed at an average, educated reader. It is divided into several thematic sections: Day’s Work, World Power, Humor in Uniform, Personal Glimpses, News of Medicine, Life in These United States, Laughter, Tales out of School, Points to Ponder, Quotable Quotes. Every page of the “Reader’s Digest” includes a photo, a graphics or a colorful picture, which is the center of visual impact or the point that grab reader’s attention.

The article “Ken Benedict’s Second Chance” is accompanied by a photo of firefighters, who form a human chain to help survivors off the engulfed hilltop. “Reader’s Digest” carries the article with two headlines: This time he has to do the right thing – other people were caught in the firestorm. The combination of the photo and the headlines gives an idea that this article is about a man, who tries to use the second chance to save people. This article is about a drama in real life.

The article is published in common literary words, though we can observe colloquial words (cul-de-sac, undercover cop, chaparral-covered bluff), phraseological expressions (come to grips with the mistakes), and medical terms (Down syndrome). The author’s choice of words, details and events communicates fear. The use of proper names, words which define time and place makes the item trustworthy (Syntia Salisbury, the Pacific).

Syntax of the magazine is a diversity of all structural types of sentences (simple, complex, compound and mixed) with a developed system of clauses connected with each other by all types of syntactic connections. Article is crammed with various syntactical means (elliptical sentences, parallel constructions, repetitions, rhetoric questions, emphatic structures), which make its context sensational, persuasive, emotional and evaluative.

Practically any stylistic device may be found in the magazine: epithets ( a bitter self-criticism), gradation, metaphors (the fire overrun)etc. Such de­vices prove to be powerful means of appraisal, expressing a personal attitude to the matter, exercising the necessary emotional effect on the reader.

In this article the editor interprets the events and suggests to the reader that it is the correct one. He appeals not only to the reader’s mind but to his feelings as well. The function of this item is to inform and entertain readers.

Lisova Vita

What is Phonosemantics

Phonosemantics is a branch of linguistics, which studies the connection between sounds and their meanings. As it happens, phonosemantics has long been eclipsed in popularity among linguists by the what is often denoted the Conventionalist position. The two most important names in this respect are Ferdinand de Saussure (d. 1913) and Noam Chomsky. The Swiss scholar F.de Saussure, generally regarded the founder of the modern scientific approach to linguistics, held that signs are arbitrary, and thus words have meaning only vis-a-vis other words. N.Chomsky, whose influence these days equals or surpasses de Saussure's, is a highly complex and controversial thinker. Still, however much leading modern linguists deny connections between sounds and meaning, the opposite opinion has permeated various traditions for thousands of years. The belief appears in the Upanishads, and is examined by Plato in his Cratylus. In the 19th century, W. von Humboldt (Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts; 1836) made the first scientific steps toward establishing connections between sounds and ideas. The study of phonosemantics has been furthered more recently by scholars such as R. Wescott, (Sound and Sense; Jupiter Press, 1980), Richard R. Rhodes and John M. Lawler ("Athematic Metaphors," Papers from the 17th Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society [1981]: 318-342), Robin Allott (1995: "Sound Symbolism," in Language in the Wurm Glaciation, edited by Udo L. Figge, 15-38. Bochum: Brockmeyer), and M. Magnus (Gods of the Word; Truman State University, 1999).

M.Magnus describes three types of sound symbol using a model first proposed by W.von Humboldt:

1) Onomatopoeia is the least significant type of symbolism. It is simply imitative of sounds, or suggests something that makes a sound (e.g. the cuckoo, bow-wow).

2) Clustering.Words that share a sound have something in common. This can be clearly seen by looking at words that start with the same letter. If we take for example all of the words that have no prefix or suffix and group them according to meaning they will fall into a small number of broad categories. So we find that many words beginning with /b/ are about barriers, bulges, bursting, and many about being banged, beaten, battered, bruised, blistered and bashed - if we compare the statistics we find that the proportion is way above average for other letters. Another way of thinking about this is to say that if a word begins with a particular phoneme, then there is likely to be a number of other words starting with that phoneme that refer to the same thing. An example given by M.Magnus is if the basic word for 'house' in a given language starts with a /h/, then by clustering, you expect disproportionately many words containing /h/ to concern housing: hut, home, hacienda, hovel,...

3) Iconism. This is noticeable when you compare words which have the same sort of referent. One way is to look at a group of words that all refer to the same thing, and that differ only in their sound, like 'stamp', stomp', 'tamp', 'tromp', 'tramp', 'step'. An /m/ before the /p/ makes the action more forceful - compare 'stamp' with 'step' or 'tamp'. The /r/ sets the word in motion, especially after a /t/ so a 'tamp' is in one place, but a 'tramp' goes for a walk. The /p/ in all those words is what emphasizes the individual steps.

In the recent years the interest in phonosemantics has been growing rapidly. There is a number of Russian and Ukrainian scientists such as S.Voronin, O.Gasov-Ginsberg, A.Zhuravlyov, V.Levitskiy, V.Kushneryk and others, who have made a big contribution in the study of phonosemantics in Russian as well as in the Germanic languages. But there are still many problems in this field, which can be solved only experimentally.