Composition of English News Stories: Strategies or Schemas?

Abstract

The research deals with the composition of the English news story revealing that it rests on the interaction of strategies, tactics and schemas of perceptual origin. The material of the research is the BBC news stories. The paper applies cognitive and discursive methods to revealing the composition of English news stories. The results obtained show that strategies determine the choice of predicates structuring an event. Schemas of perceptual origin define the representation of event components in terms of human perception of environment: focusing, with the concentration of attention on one entity; identification, with the introduction of a single entity into the reader’s visual field; zooming-in by the use of the nouns indicating a transformation of a far distance into remote, close or immediate. In this case remote event models are comparatively few in number, because they offer a general picture of what is happening, without going into detail. In case of the subjective zooming-in model the desired effect is evoked by the interaction of collective nouns pointing to a group, i.e. distant perspective, and units in the plural, implying a distant position. The event-subjective perspective is implemented by a sequence of uncountables, denoting a general state of affairs, countables in the plural and in the singular, representing participants from the near or close distance. The tactics include verbalized contents into the composition of the text introducing the sections of context, commentaries, referring to witnesses or sources of information. The conclusions indicate the interaction of strategies, perceptual schemas and tactics in organizing English news stories.