THE PHATIC CONSTITUENT OF A MODERN MEDIA TEXT (ON THE MATERIAL OF FILM RECORDS)

Abstract

The article deals with the phatic component of modern media communication. The research problem consist in defining the peculiarities of realization of the phatic constituent in media text. The empirical material includes the two types of text: professional reviews published in mass media and users’ reviews about the Hollywood producer Nolan’s movie Tenet placed on Yandex Dzen platform. The Traditional understanding of phatic as “communication for communication sake” (e.g., a talk of random passengers on a train) considers this type of communication as opposed to informative speech interaction. This urgency of this research can be attributed to the fact that transformation of media space, associated mainly with the development of Internet communication, has considerably changed both the very notion of phatic communication and the correlation of phatic and informational component in media text. The authors suppose that “contact ensuring” function, realized both in professional mass media and in blogs, is the main function of phatic communication in the media text. The method of communicative-pragmatic analysis was employed to reveal the techniques that allow the media text producer to attract and keep attention of “their” reader, such as: total irony, opposition “own-alien”, I-discourse and you-discourse, use of precedent phenomena, etc. The analysis has shown that informative and phatic components are not opposed in modern media texts: these two planes form one complex area aimed at simultaneously informing the addressee, influencing their system of values and engaging them in an online dialogue, which is the basis principle of mass communication today. The media text producer solves the phatic task of communicative tuning in to “their” interlocutor and maintaining contact with a virtual text receiver via using precedent phenomena, implicit and explicit methods of self-presentation, stylistic devices (banter, irony). The phatic constituent does not reduce the “informational density” of the text but rather performs its informational diversification aimed at activation of the communicative process.