12. The style of news media (broadcast journalism)

The world of the news media embraces the spheres of (1) print (newspapers and magazines) and (2) broadcast (radio and television) journalism. It performs multifarious functions; they are mainly to inform a wide audience about the current events, to suggest and often impose their possible interpretation or just to share an opinion about them with a contemporary.

Modern radio and television also disseminate local and foreign news, entertain and educate the listener and the viewer.

Entertaining genres include a bunch of shows (e.g. reality, variety, talk shows), dramas (e.g. medical and legal dramas), comedies (e.g. alternative comedies and sitcoms). Educational formats differ according to the intended audience: adult or children viewers (e.g. authored documentaries, factual series, quizzes, teaching programmes). All of them have got their own specificity.

Current news in broadcasting is reported in the news bulletin or newscast -presented by one or more anchors or announcers - where the information is updated with each release. It traditionally consists of a series of news items and falls into several blocks (e.g. general, politics, business, sport, weather). Sometimes it is expanded by a crawl line.

In addition, television and radio news programmes start up and end with a headline.

It is a news round-up which contains the main news issues read out before the full broadcast and summarized at the end.

There is little linguistic difference between the way radio and television air the news, apart from the reference in the latter to what is happening on the screen. The major claim here is the impartiality of expression. Therefore, they are also reduced to listing the essentials in neutral and cliched language. Both use the same, as in print journalism varieties, structure of lead-item summaries followed by further accounts, and live or pre-recorded interviews and reports from special correspondents.

The dominant feature of the "play-by-play" commentary is a highly formulaic manner of expression which helps fluency and gives the commentator time to think. At times the speed of delivery gets slower or faster, reflecting the atmosphere in the field.

As such commentaries are oral reports of the on-going activities; they are characterized by the use of the present tense, ellipsis, and the inverted word order. One of the "survival" devices is the frequent use of the passive constructions that allows the commentator to delay voicing the player's name.

13. Text stylistics. Types of information.Basic textual segments.Text categories.

Text Stylistics aims at investigating the most effective ways and means of producing texts belonging to different styles, substyles and genres. Stylistic analysis of a concrete text should lead to a clear and profound understanding of its content. In this respect stylistically significant seem to be the problems related to the types of information imparted by different texts, the problem of text categories and the problem of basic textual segments.

The main types of textual information

Taking into account I.R.Galperms point of view, one can speak about three types of content information: - factual, - conceptual and - subtextual.

Factual information is associated with data about people, things, and events existing in real or fictitious worlds. Being rendered by lexical units in their direct dictionary meanings, it is always explicit. It is also supposed to be logical and objective by character.

Conceptual information reflects the author's individual understanding of the relationships among the people, things, and events described, for example, their significance and universality, their cause-effect links, etc. Since this sort of logical information is inferred, various interpretations are possible. Conceptual information is derived from the text by the reader himself/herself and in this respect it can be subjective. Though one shouldn't forget that the opposition objective subjective is relative when applied to information.

Subtextual information is a kind of implicit information stylistic by its nature. This additional information can appear in the text as a result of interaction and simultaneous realization of different types of lexical and structural meanings. Associative and connotative meanings, accompanying direct meanings of language units, constitute the basis of implication.

The basic textual segment

Each consecutive level of lingual signs consists of elements belonging to the preceding level of language hierarchy. e.g. phonemes - morphemes - words - sentences - text.

To the list may be added intermediate phenomena of free word combinations, phraseological units, and supra-phrasal units.

Heated discussions on what is to be recognized as the basic textual segment are still going on. In one view, it should be nothing else but a supra-phrasal units.

The practical problem is that supra-phrasal units are not clearly perceived in most types of texts. Moreover, they often coincide with paragraphs also competing for the role of basic textual segment. Indeed, written discourse graphically falls into paragraphs. Each paragraph can be treated as a unit of thought, separate at least from the point of view of the author conveying the message he desires. One might also say that each paragraph deals with a theme and develops an idea. Most paragraphs consist of two parts:

• the thesis usually contained in the topic, or key, sentence;

• the supporting details revolving around this main idea and expanding on it.

It should be specially noted that paragraphing can be of different character in different functional styles. For instance, it is strictly logical in the language of science, highly traditional in legal documents, to a great extent psychological in the language of the press, and mainly aesthetic in poetry and emotive prose.

Significant text categories

It should be specially emphasized that there is no unanimous opinion about the number and types of stylistically relevant text categories. Those which are most frequently mentioned might fall into two groups. By nature, they are:

• Content categories, characterizing the text in terms of its semantics and pragmatics including: -informativity , -modality, -expressiveness, -emotiveness, -accentuation, -intertextuality.

• Arid structural categories which do not deal with the ontological aspect of the text and are represented by –cohesion; -integrity completeness.

Modality is generally recognized as one of the main categories of Text Linguistics. Modality is inherent in any text, because any text is a result of the author's subjective evaluation of the objective reality. The text reflects the worldthe author's eyes; therefore, the essence of modality is the manifestation of he author's attitude to the phenomena described. Modality can be expressed explicitly, e.g. with the help of modal or evaluative and implicitly, that is through a mere choice of described objects, through one touched upon topic and the problems raised.

Expressiveness, in its turn, is a purely stylistic category. It is mainly associated with the aesthetic information, contained in the text, and expressiveness largely contributes to its effectiveness. Expressiveness can be traced on different language levels and is realized in the text through the imagery, transposition, breaking normative valency of words and their combinations, inclusion of dialectal words and borrowings, juxtaposition of something that is never used together, etc.

Accentuation aims at giving semantic prominence to a certain piece of factual information or laying special emphasis on the most important (in the author's view) elements of conceptual information. The choice of language means which can perform these functions depends uponthe type of the text. In scholarly articles, for instance, the category of accentuation, it is realized through a wide range of explicit connectives, parenthetic words and question-answer patterns. In other functional styles it may deal with intensifiers, stylistic repetition, parallelism, etc.

Intertextualityis one more important content category closely connected with the notion of subtext and understanding the text itself as the dialogue going on between the author and the reader during the process of their communication. A subtext can be created with the help of citations, allusions, reminiscences, and other sorts of inclusions the author can make use of to convey an intended message.

Cohesion can be understood in two ways - as formal cohesion or content cohesion. The latter is often referred to as coherence and is associated with a logically consistent development of the main theme. It secures the unity of the text content and in this sense it is not a purely structural category.

External cohesion is actually realized by means of different types of formal •inks including:

• connectors (and, but, yet, however, therefore, moreover;)

•transitions (e.g. accordingly, and then, again, at the same time, as a result, for example, for instance, on the other hand, first, second, finally, in conclusion, similarly, in other words;)

•pronouns (e.g. this, that, these, those, his, her, its;)

• lexical and synonymic repetitions including the distant word repetition; » developed antithesis;

• sustained, or prolonged, metaphor;

• parallel constructions through which the reader is led back to the ideas phrased in similar syntactical forms.