Value Dominants of Basque Mentality in the Contemporary Media in Spain

Abstract

The article discusses and interprets the Basque mentality values and their evidence in the contemporary political discourse and media. An important task of communication science and medialinguistics is the study of pragma-linguistic properties of media texts and their impact on the audience. The contemporary Spanish media feature an impressive range of sources representing and interpreting the multicultural and multi-ethnic situation in Spain, as well as ongoing socio-political and socio-economic changes. Together with the Spanish language being the official state language, the Catalan, the Galician and the Basque have been established co-official languages by the Spanish Constitution. Basque Autonomous Community, or the Basque Country, is one of the most prosperous and steadily developing Autonomous Communities of Spain, which affects the socio-political situation in the region and the discourse of political parties. A vast majority of Basque people are bilingual. The hypothesis of this study states that the contemporary reality of the Basque Country finds its reflection in value dominants of the discourse of political parties of the Basque Country. This discourse is objectified by the Mass Media rhetoric, studying which the authors determine and discuss the value dominants of Basque linguistic culture, their linguo-pragmatic features and their use in the media language, as well as their lexical, semantic, morphological and syntactic features. All this builds up the topicality of the research into pragma-linguistic parameters of media texts and mechanisms of their impact on the audience. The authors infer that the media rhetoric includes onomastic dominants (naming units of Spanish Basque Country and French Basque Country and their paraphrases, of Spain, Basque people, and the Basque language), and keywords of the Basque mentality introduced into a Spanish text in Basque. Moreover, being integral components of the discourse of political parties in the Basque Country, these linguistic means acquire and realize their cultural and symbolic potential, and reflect the mentality, values, and traditions of Basques in the modern Basque and Spanish media.