LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF PERIODICALS (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF THE ENGLISH MAGAZINE “SPOTLIGHT”)

Abstract. The article focuses on the language of the media as a modern phenomenon of linguistics, as well as on the analysis of the main linguistic features of mass media publications based on the English magazine “Spotlight”.

Keywords: mass media, publicistic functional style, linguistic features, magazines.

To date, the society is actively showing interest in the language of modern mass media. The changes taking place in the language of magazines and newspapers significantly affect the literary norm of the language, since changes in society simultaneously change the language.

The mass media process, analyze information and transmit it to the reader, commenting, analyzing and covering events, thereby influencing the formation of moral norms and values, aesthetic tastes. Often there is also the imposition of any truths - political, historical, psychological. All this is achieved through the use of a specific language, which differs significantly from scientific or fiction literature, as well as from colloquial speech. These differences are due to the careful and prolonged selection of linguistic and expressive means, the study of which is of great value to linguists and philologists and is very relevant. It should be noted that for socio-political literature, as well as periodicals, i.e. for newspapers and magazines, a journalistic style is characteristic. The content of journalistic works serves to express opinions on important modern social, political or economic issues, analysis of social situations, processes and phenomena. According to N.S. Valgina, "journalism is, first of all, a pronounced author's position, one of the forms of manifestation of the author's tendentiousness; this is the art of argumentation, persuasion, so the non-standard and brightness of expression enhances the effectiveness of speech." Indeed, the role of journalism is also to convince the reader to influence his thoughts and feelings in order to create public opinion. Such an impact on the reader is possible due to the fact that the journalistic style is a special style: it combines the features of scientific and artistic styles, which makes it more expressive and convincing. He is brought closer to the style of scientific prose by the logical sequence in the presentation of facts, the fullness of the statement, more or less strict division into logical segments (paragraphs). In turn, the imagery of speech, as well as the emotional elements of language, journalism borrows from the artistic style. Another feature that brings this style closer to the style of artistic speech is the manifestation of individual content in the presentation.

In addition to borrowed features, the journalistic style has a number of its own, unique features.

First of all, let's turn to the study of the lexical features of this style and illustrate them with real examples from articles presented in the English-language magazine “Spotlight”: “A transparent future”, published in the 9th issue of the magazine for 2020, and “In the book business”, published in the 1st issue of the magazine also for 2020. In the first article, the author expresses his opinion on how the development of modern technologies affects our lives and tells us what conspiracy theories exist in this area. In the second article, which is written in the form of a personal note, the author narrates in the first person and tells about his experience of publishing the book.

One of the most important features of the language of journalism is the heterogeneity of the lexical units used. This style skillfully combines all three groups of English vocabulary, which were highlighted by I.R. Galperin. According to the classification proposed by him, there is a literary and book vocabulary (terms, neologisms, archaisms, barbarisms and foreign words), neutral vocabulary and colloquial vocabulary (slang, professionalism, jargon and vulgarisms). So, in the analyzed articles it is found as a literary and book vocabulary, namely the terms: musical: adagio, moderato, allegro, vivace, biological: oesophagus, alimentary canal, terms related to writing and publishing books: layout, contents page, cover design, self-publishing, captive audience, colloquial vocabulary: zoom in on, I mean..., that's no doubt, just think..., You know..., guy, I'm pretty sure..., fool (v), a bit ..., as well as neutral: wire a book, save up stories, include, ask, newspaper, visitors.

In addition, as the analysis of the articles under study showed, the journalistic style is characterized by the use of polysemous words: direction (instruction – direction), cookies (cookies – cookies); synonyms: figure out – find out, sell – make some sales, afraid – worried, introductory units that convey the logic of following a thought: after, then, the next step, in other words, also, perhaps; the predominance of concrete words over abstract ones: mobile phone, detail, download, data, contract, government. Such diversity and heterogeneity of vocabulary is primarily due to the fact that the journalistic style combines features of artistic and scientific styles, and is also characterized by internal genre diversity.

Another feature of the vocabulary of journalistic texts is the use of the most relevant forms and means of presentation of the material, the use of the most commonly used lexical units.

Journalistic works also have a number of certain syntactic features. The syntactic structure of journalistic speech strives for transparency of syntactic constructions, clarity in the construction of sentences, as well as simplicity and clarity of structures. It is as diverse and heterogeneous as the lexical content of journalistic works.

It should be noted the frequent use of simple sentences in the articles under study: 1) The name “fifth generation” sounds impressive; 2) Donald Trump thought so. The texts also show a combination of simple sentences with complex ones, which include subordinate clauses and homogeneous terms: I had a captivating audience in the town where I live, since almost everyone knew I was writing the book, and they all wanted to find out whether or not they were mentioned.

For expressive purposes, inversion, different types of actualization, repetitions, appeals, exclamation, interrogative, incentive sentences, direct speech, parcellation, etc. are often used. This presentation of the material creates the illusion of free, relaxed speech and live communication, which contributes to the establishment of contact between the reader and the author, as well as the involvement of the reader in the reading process. So, the authors of the analyzed articles resort to intentionally dividing a coherent text into several punctuation and intonation independent segments, i.e. they use parcelled constructions: Perhaps the story about Crypto really does serve as a warning when communications technology is so dominated by giants like Huawei. And Google*. In the articles we analyzed, we managed to identify the following figurative means of speech: comparisons, epithets, metonymy, metaphor, personification, rhetorical question, punning rhyme. First of all, artfully chosen comparisons: Will Vodafone's fifth be like Beethoven's, admit still in 250 years’ time? The author compares the creation of the fifth generation of networks of one of the largest mobile operators Vodafone with Symphony No. 5, written by Ludwig van Beethoven. The comparison is based on irony, since the significance and grandiosity of creating 5G networks is rather exaggerated.

Thus, after analyzing the lexical and stylistic features of some journalistic texts from the Spotlight magazine, we were convinced that these journalistic texts really belong to the journalistic style, as evidenced by the heterogeneity of lexical units, the combination of standard and expression, the mixing of different layers of vocabulary: from book to colloquial.

*(At the request of Roskomnadzor, we inform you that a foreign person who owns Google information resources is a violator of the legislation of the Russian Federation - ed. note)