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Karimova A.E., PhD doctor Akynova D.B.
L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Kazakhstan
Specifics of stylistic devices usage in
English Mass Media Texts
Abstract
One of the most important
features of the publicist style is usage of the most wide-spread ways of
presenting materials to society such as frequently preferable lexical units,
phraseological units and metaphorical expressions that are characteristics of language
system of that period. The attempts to make the content more topical enable the
journalists to search the relevant forms of its expression. Therefore, this
style has a significant impact on the development of language standards. The
purpose of the study is to identify specifics of
stylistic devices usage in English mass media texts through analyzing English
newspapers such as “The Guardian”, “BBC News”, and “The Telegraph”. The results
indicated that there is an appearance of amalgamation of the styles in English
mass media language due to the wide usage of expressive means of the language
as a way to attract the attention of the audience.
Key words: mass media, publicist
style, stylistic device, expressive means, newspaper style.
1.
Introduction
Today the mass media has
a tremendous influence on our consciousness, the lives of people, as well as on
our languages and cultures. The problem of efficiency and adequacy of the
information transmission remains still fundamental. The publicist style
referring to the language of the media and media texts plays a huge role in
shaping the modern languages. Perhaps, the converted language of the British
quality press has become one of the incentives for the creation of a new field
of linguistics - medialinguistics [1, 114].
According to many linguists, newspaper style became the separate
linguistic style, or at least has developed as the special kind of the functional
language. The newspaper language formulates the principles of integration the stylistically
diverse linguistic resources that are not found in other types of speech. Although the main function of mass
media is considered to be the transmission of the information, this process is
rarely completely neutral. The conveyance of the information is often
accompanied by direct or veiled evaluation and opinion of journalists or
editorial boards. This assessment is most commonly transmitted by language
devices and speech techniques that encourage the audience to a specific
reaction to the information [2, 264].
Shahovskyi V.I. delineates the ability of the
author to use the system of multi-level emotive means and stylistic devices to
reflect the personal aesthetic concept and emotional picture of the world in
the text as one of the components of emotional competence of the author. The
expression forms of internal emotional pressure and bursts in the medial
discourse are verbal and non-verbal and linguistic signs: expressive syntax,
stylistic devices. Most frequently used among them are epithets, metaphors,
similes, antithesis, rhetorical questions, irony and sarcasm [3, 416].
While determining
stylistic device, Zherebilo T.V. emphasizes the factor of text formation.
According to this definition, “a stylistic device is a subjective linguistic
factor of text formation, reflecting a specific way of text organization
selected by the author to express adequately his vision and the situation”. The
main function of stylistic devices is to strengthen the pragmatic effect of the
text and to reflect the specific organization of language means to make a
particular expression. The author defines “the participation in formation the stylistic
structure of the text (scientific, official, publicists, colloquial, belles-letters),
which is considered to be a set of stylistic features” as the main criterion
stylistic devices [4, 486].
The present study was aimed at determining
specifics of stylistic devices usage in English mass media texts as well as
English newspapers such as “The Guardian”, “BBC News”, and “The Telegraph”. The
research dealt with not only the study of various trends of newspaper texts,
but also with the analysis of English language devices that are frequently
found in the newspaper texts.
2.
Research methodology
Sixty English
articles from the most popular newspapers
“The Guardian”, “BBC News”, “The Telegraph” as well as from their electronic
resources for 2010-2013 years were selected as the objects of study. The subject of
the study involves the specific of stylistic features of English publicist
texts, the description and the characterization of the lexical and grammatical
components of these texts. These publications are recognized worldwide
reputable and vivid examples of the quality press. The approach of the research
relied on qualitative analysis of modern English press texts as well as the
language means of selected data. It should also be noticed that there is
already a number of works devoted to the analysis of data papers (Y.N.Kulikova,
V.P Novikov, E.V. Gnusina, A.E. Okunkova). The texts are intended for the study
of linguistic features especially vocabulary and stylistic devices, confirming
the validity of the qualification of these texts as a publicist, and revealing
a number of specific stylistic peculiarities in written press.
3.
Findings and
Discussion
The articles of “The Guardian”, “BBC News”, “The Telegraph” newspapers
were analyzed in order to define the specifics of stylistic devices usage in
English mass media texts. It was found that the language of newspaper tends to
be depicted by high degree of language standardization, the reduced level of
vocabulary, the extensive usage idiomatic expressions as well as speech figures
such as irony, personification, similes, metaphors and metonymy. Furthermore,
there is an appearance of amalgamation of the styles in English mass media
language because of widely using of expressive means of the language as a way
to attract the attention of the audience. The results of analysis are presented
as follows.
1. In fact,
the official guarded style of the British business media is changing, adapting
to the Internet audience. There is a common reduced level of the vocabulary on
the pages of high-quality British press, newspapers “The Guardian” and “The
Telegraph”:
“But according to many
economists, the last thing the US economy needs now is a dose of austerity. If anything, there
has been too much already” [5].
“Anger at the Internal Revenue Service scandal boiled over at a congressional hearing
on Tuesday when a senior Republican senator accused one of the former heads of
the agency of" lying by omission”.
“After senator grilled the two IRS former bosses,
Steven Miller, who was fired last
week, and Doug Shulman, who was in charge at the time of the scandal and was
giving evidence for the first time since the row broke” [7].
In the
latter example, in addition to the reduced vocabulary there is traced an
interesting metaphor: a scandal “grilled”,
Senator “grilled” (interrogation)
suspended from business chiefs who “fired” at work (have been dismissed). All
three verbs are stylistically painted and vivid example of the expressive
vocabulary.
2. The
metaphor helps to convey the contents of clarity, causing the reader a concrete
sense-perception of the facts and phenomena of social and political life:
“Reviewing Nigel Hamilton's American Caesars, Peter Preston describes
covert negotiations between Richard Nixon and Vietnamese communists as “a pact with the devil” [5].
“Game boy:
Will the incoming president of the Football Association (Letters, June 10) be
able to march his men to the top of the
hill, or will it be decided on a penalty shootout - as usual?” [5].
“The sobering element of today's
development is the reminder to all Australians that the threat of terrorism is alive and well, and this requires
continued vigilance on the part of our security authorities,” said Australian
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd” [6].
In this
example, the author gives some assessment of the events through the use of
metaphorical phrases “sobering element”
and “the threat of terrorism is alive and
well”.
3. Personification
denotes attributing inanimate object or actions by the quality of the living
beings, usually humans. It can also serve as a mean of emotional and expressive
separation phenomena and events of social and political life:
“Cyprus makes frantic effort to prevent
run on its banks” [7].
“London
gets its first shot at an elected mayor and the Guardian stays silent rather
than endorse the egomaniacal breakaway independent or the bearded” [5].
4. Irony
is based on the simultaneous realization of two opposite meanings: the
permanent, “direct” meaning (the dictionary meaning) of words and their
contextual (covert, implied) meaning.
“In the Great Portland Street office
of Democrats Abroad, men with
perfect teeth are explaining how to vote to expats down the phone line who
apparently have never used the internet before” [6].
Ironically the author makes the remark about
the “perfect teeth”. Of course, the teeth have no relation to the
occupation of the hero. He explains by phone expats who probably never used the
Internet for the voting process.
5.Specific
stylistic device, which is widely used in the pages of high-quality English
press, is an allusion. The allusion refers the reader to the historic event,
literature, art and so forth. It is easy to guess the title
of Carroll’s book (Lewis Carroll) in the title “The Telegraph”: “Malice
in wonderland”.
“Dubbed ‘the Vanity Fair of terrorism’, Inspire
features prominently in professional literature on the “self-radicalisation” of
extremists who find their way to al-Qaida or like-minded groups via computer
screens in their bedrooms, rather than fighting kuffar in Afghanistan or Iraq” [5].
This passage
can easily discern a reference to the “Vanity
Fair” (eng. Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero) – William Makepeace
Thackeray’s classic novel of the era of the Napoleonic Wars.
6. Antithesis is the placing of a sentence or one of its parts
against another to which it is opposed to form a balanced contrast of ideas.
“Give me liberty, or give me death ,” says Alex, who attended last years
Carnival. “The Carnival was great, as a student of Pennsbury--I really admired
the amount of effort they took to do the carnival and make life more enjoyable
for us students” [7].
“Peter
Preston: good news on a bad day for
one polio victim” [5].
The
widespread use of antitheses in journalism is due to critical oriented
newspaper materials, especially genres such as editorial, polemical article,
pamphlet.
7. The
creation of expressiveness in the press can be also served by oxymorons - the
lexical units that are mutually exclusive of each other, a combination of
incongruous. Oxymorons are often found
in the headlines:
“Tragic
comedy. Bernard Manning has sustained a racist popular culture on and off
our screens for many years. His comic timing should not exonerate him?” [7].
8. Traditionally,
euphemisms are used in political texts that are capable in varying degrees to
manipulate the mind of the recipient. The use of political euphemisms refers
replacing by another concept. For example, the word “slump” and “depression”
may be replaced by the following synonyms: recession, a rolling readjustment, a
correction, a slippage, an easing, a downswing, a leveling off, a lull, a
return to normalcy. Formation of euphemisms is a complex linguistic-cultural
process, reflecting changes in society. Using euphemisms promotes the formation
of new phraseological units, political clichés, the development of the
semantics of certain tokens. For example, the expression “defence umbrella”, used as the euphemism when it means weapons,
acquired the meaning “a protective cover”:
“There has been unease in
Israel over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comments about a regional “defence umbrella”, should Iran acquire
a nuclear weapon” [5].
Thus, the
lexical structure of modern English press media has a high degree of
standardization (a large percentage of clichéd phrases, clichés).
4.
Conclusion
The present
article dealt with using results of qualitative analysis of modern English
press texts as guidelines for determination of
stylistic devices usage in English mass media. This paper
illustrated a fairly complete picture of the stylistic expressive means used in
the analyzed publications. It was determined by the communicative orientation
of the text to attract attention and to entertain the readers. It was
discovered that the standards of oral and written language tend to be found in
English mass media. Additionally, it is considered that the transmission of the
media texts is implemented by mixing colloquial and fiction styles. This fact was
proved by the tendency to blur the stylistic boundaries, the dissemination of
colloquial standards in newspaper styles and the reduction of the speech rate
due to the use of media clichés, non-standard vocabulary and stylistic
devices.
The given
lexical-stylistic analysis makes it possible to conclude that the modern
English newspaper articles characterized by the complexity and the
heterogeneity of stylistic figuration. The expressiveness of mass media texts
is achieved through the vocabulary of certain modal colorings as well as
through the usage of the stylistic devices and figures. The publications
intended for a wide range of the readers often contain elements of the literary
genres.
References
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Okunkova, A.E. Linguostylistic,
syntactic and semantic features of British media texts // Vestnik MGOU: scien. magazine. - 2012. - 114-119 p.
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Dobrosklonskaya,
G.T. Medialinguistics: systematic approach of learning Mass Media language:
modern English media speech: tutorial // G.T Dobrosklonskaya. Ì.: Flinta. - 2008. - 264 p.
3.
Shahovskyi, V.I. Linguistic theory
of emotions: monography / V.I. Shahovskyi. – Ì.:
Gnozis, 2008. – 416 p.
4.
Zherebilo, T.V. Dictionary of
linguistic terms / Piligrim. - Nazran:
2010. – 486 p.