Models of structuring English news texts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2311-259x.2024.3.7Keywords:
news text, persuasiveness, morphosyntactic construction, construct, model of structuring news textsAbstract
The relevance of the article is determined by the attention of modern linguists to the study of texts of various genres and their impact on the target audience. The object of the research is news texts, which resort to convincing the addressee of the truthfulness of the events described, influencing their perception, judgment and worldview. There arises a problem of how news texts guide their readers in forming a particular view on the event. The persuasive nature of news texts has made it possible to study them with the help of rhetorical modes of persuasion: ethos, logos, and pathos. The purpose of the research is to establish models of structuring news texts at the level of their composition and linguistic ornamentation. The novelty of the work consists in the application of the constructionist approach, based on morphosyntactic constructions as pairings of form, meaning and functions, stored at the mental level. Constructs as speech realization of constructions represent various relations of the surrounding world. During the research, the method of continuous sampling, component, contextual and rhetorical analyses were applied. The research material comprises 150 news texts on the English website BBC News.
The results of the study. Models of structuring news texts reflect their impact on the target audience. Depending on the type of construct and its placement in the headline, lead, post-lead and the main text of the news, three models are distinguished: descriptive, authorizing and emotive. According to the descriptive model, news texts appeal to logos via arguments, judgments, and facts and are characterized by focusing, that is, the repetition of identical or synonymous agentive constructs in successive paragraphs. The authorizing model of news texts structuring is based on ethos, that is, appeal to famous personalities, experts and witnesses of the event as a mode of persuasion and a source of information. This model is embodied by predicative constructs indicating speech process in the headline or lead. The emotive model of arranging news texts appeals to pathos and is represented by emotive predicative constructs or evaluative pairings. Further research foresees considering news reports about the speeches of famous personalities and politicians and narratives using the constructionist approach.
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