Media Genres and Compositional Speech Forms of Journalism: Relationships and Connections

Abstract

The existing set of media text modifications with their numerous contexts remains largely understudied in terms of text typology. There are no complex descriptions of the types of media messages. The article raises the problem of correlation between media genres and the compositional speech forms of journalism. The author interprets compositional speech forms as complex functional textual units that structure the thought and give it integrity and completeness. Genre approaches to classifications and current media text typology issues dominate in the contemporary text linguistics, despite the fact that the genre remains its central category. The Germanic studies have accumulated enough experience to generalize the existing points of view and cover all possible journalistic representation forms (journalistische Darstellungsformen). From the standpoint of text linguistics, it is the genre variety of media proposals that confirms the priority of the term Textsorte, which covers homogeneous text classes that are hierarchically the same. This article focuses on the term Textsorte, since it covers the whole variety of media genres and fixes the hierarchical principle of the text function in the system of communicative speech classifications. Therefore, Textsorte is the main operational reference point in German genre studies and the basis for multidimensional classifications of media texts.