SMALL-FORMAT “NEWS FLOW” MEDIATEXTS IN THE FOCUS OF LINGUISTICS: GENRE AND LANGUAGE PECULIARITIES

Abstract

Today the media sphere is one of the most active functional areas of the modern Russian language, and it demonstrates the major current trends of modern Russian speech in the most vivid way. This is what conditions the study of small-format texts of the “news flow”, which belong to the basic and most widespread media texts. These texts are characterized by a stable structure and certain genre and linguistic features, the description of which is the purpose of the study. News stories of news agencies, captions, news tickers and other text materials of T.V. news programs were chosen as sources of material. It is small-format news media texts that represent media speech “in its pure form”. The volume of such texts varies from a single utterance to texts of an average volume, consisting of 4-6 paragraphs (up to 5000 characters). The nature of the genre determines the placement of information in these texts according to the “inverted pyramid” principle, well-known in journalistic practice, as well as the prevalence of the informative component, semantic density, syntactic minimalism in such texts. The article considers the main common feature of small-format news media texts - linguistic asceticism, consisting in “anti-creativity”, “neutrality” of speech, absence of distinct metaphorical and evaluative linguistic means, in simple syntactic structures. The most striking linguistic features of these texts, which singles them out in a separate group, include a large number of abbreviations, borrowings, structures that indicate the source of the news information. Small-format news media texts have significant linguodidactic potential. A stable structure and fairly rigid regulation of the language give grounds for their more active use as didactic material in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL) and Russian as a non-native language (RNL).