Discourse Analysis and Stylistics: Integrative Methods for Research in Media Communication

In Russian communicative studies we can observe the collision of traditional Russian Stylistics and Western Discourse Analysis which resulted in eclectic and random use of terminology and methods of Discourse Analysis. Even the terms style and discourse are often mixed up and are not differentiated. The purpose of the article is to point out some theoretical problems concerning the “competition” of two communicative disciplines in the study of media discourse - Stylistics and Discourse Analysis - and to outline the ways of their possible cooperation and integration of their methods in Russian Linguistics. In our research we analyze two theoretical conceptions of text analysis in media communication - stylistic and discursive, which have the common subject of research, which is text, and the same communicative vector of study, but they apply different methods of analysis and different terminology. I distinguish between style and discourse and argue that style and discourse do not exclude one another, but to some extent they overlap and complement each other. Such approach gives a new impetus to the development of Russian and Slavonic stylistics in communicative perspective as well as encourages the study of stylistic organization of media discourse.

stylistic, discourse, taxonomy of discourses, functional styles, media discourse, intension method, narrative organization of media discourse