К вопросу типологии и интерпретации медиатекстов

Abstract

This article is devoted to the notion and typology of mediatexts and their interpretation. With the plummeting interest in various types of e-texts and the communication upheaval caused by the Internet, mediatexts have captured the attention of a wide audience of readers. Linguists worldwide are paying close attention to the specifics of mediatext construction. This paper follows the ideas of R. Fowler, D. Crystal and T. G. Dobrosklonskaya and emphasizes the function of persuasion that prevails over informative function of mediatexts. The role of non-verbal elements (audio, visual etc.) and their interconnection with the verbal elements is also mentioned in the article. The mediatexts discussed in this work include not only newspaper and magazine articles, editorials and features, but also news reports, TV and radio programmes, talk-shows, advertisements, political, business etc. talks, posts and social media comments, blogs etc. Taking into account the abundance of media genres it seems important to present a certain categorization of mediatexts. This articles differentiates the following types: texts created by one author vs. a whole team of authors, oral vs. written texts, printed/ radio/television/Internet texts, journalist/advertising/PR-text, mass communication vs. specialized text, creolized vs. non-creolized text, thematically driven variety of texts. Interpreting mediatexts can be perceived as an exciting undertaking that involves reading between the lines to see the author’s perspective and the message that it brings across to the audience. Depending on how subjective the author is, the reality depicted in the text can aim at its relatively objective representation or can offer its reconstruction based on far-fetched and misleading conclusions that set the goal of misinforming the reader.