Job titles as a means of constructing personal authority

Abstract

The article deals with the nominative component of constructing personal authority. The nominative component consists of three parts: the name itself, the job title, and its characteristic. As a result of the analysis of news texts published in popular Russian-language media’s Telegram channels, it has been proven that the most common subjects’ nominations in news discourse are those that contain a job title or its equivalent. The main types of nominations with a job title are described: a job title + a name, a job title without a name, a job title + a name + its characteristic, and cases of anonymous subjects’ nominations with a job title. Nominations containing a name and a job title without its characteristic account for over 90 % of the identified cases of use; they are also the most variable. Types of nominations are analysed with attention to possible configurations of its components and a news message authors’ pragmatic goal. The discussion segment outlines promising directions for further study of the scientific problem.