Vol 19, No 4 (2021): Modern issues of Russian media language studies

The paper deals with the urgent and topical issue of political linguistics - the influence of information and psychological warfare on the Russian language. The aim of the paper is to describe the most frequent novices in the modern Russian language and speech which occur due to the domestic information and psychological warfare. The research was carried out on the basis of the mass-media texts, the traditional linguistic research methods were used (analysis and description, contextual and axiological analysis, etc.). As the result of the analysis the authors singled out both new and traditional words and word combinations which simultaneously serve as the weapon and the result of information and psychological warfare. Two groups of language (speech) means were defined: specialized (which perform the relevant evaluative function - either positive or negative) and non-specialized (which change the function depending on the context, the semantic ambivalent words and word combinations). The specialized means include pejorative words and word combinations: political labels, invectives, terribilitisms (“bogey-words”), delusions (“trap-words”), negatively connotative words, and euphemisms. Ameliorative means are not characteristic of information and psychological warfare, though words and word combinations are widely used which denote national concepts being the subject of information rivalry. Neutral language means in information and psychological warfare in the Russian language include terms and terminoids, naming various types of rivalries and technologies constituting them. The results obtained contribute to the development of the information and psychological warfare linguistics. Research perspectives encompass the refinement of some points and the analysis of information and psychological warfare language consequences in the light of linguistic ecology.

The research deals with one of the most important topics in the field of studying Russian as a foreign language - the diversity of the Russian language media environment. The purpose of the study is to determine its status in Russian-speaking media environment professional journalistic speech, that is its communicative status. The work analyses Russian-language publications of the traditional print press, radio, television, and materials presented in the communicative environment of the Internet: sites of various publishing houses, publics on social networks, blogs, etc. The paper is based on descriptive and comparative analysis. For the first time the content of the concept professional journalistic speech is revealed in the linguistic aspect. The main feature defining the ontology of media speech is the utility - direct involvement in general social life. Media text in its existence is always associated with the time of its publication, has specific coordinates of the social space-time, is created for here and for now. It is this feature of media speech that determines all its lexical and grammatical parameters. The media environment is presented as a space for everyday social communication. It is accompanied by the communicative space of everyday interpersonal communication - conversational speech. The latter thanks to Internet communication technologies actively invades the media speech space. Media speech actively interacts with colloquial speech. The research has shown that professional journalistic speech has always been a systemic element of the media environment, which manifests itself in a wide variety of forms. Numerous private enterprises are adapting professional journalistic speech products to their needs. The media communication environment is open, and in its borders, the printed form of colloquial speech is emerging. The space of non-professional media speech is also emerging - certain types of blogs, news feed “Yandex-Zen”. In the media sphere, the share of oral speech is constantly increasing. Because of the general trend towards personalization of the general information and analytical stream, the volume of author broadcasting increases. In this situation professional oral journalism requires special attention in the aspect of its non-verbal components of communication. Specialization in author broadcasting needs the technology of teaching Russian oral speech with increased attention to non-verbal components that have a pronounced national identity. The research prospects are primarily associated with dynamically developing local Russian-language speech media systems as verbal and polycode, as their composition is constantly being updated.

The role of precedent phenomena in the media space, in the processes of text generation and meaning formation of the media text is studied. Today, the media are modelling the reality. It may differ from the reality as it is, which is not reflected, but presented through diverse interpretations. In interpreting a statement/message, a significant role belongs to precedent phenomena and the underlying knowledge structures. The problems of the media text, a socially significant communicative environment of our time, determined the relevance of the research. The purpose of the study is to characterize the role of precedent units in interpreting the media text (at the level of meaning and significance). The materials of the research are Russian newspapers, the Newspaper Corpus of the Russian Language, the National Corpus of the Russian Language, and internet sources in Russian. The authors used methods of the discursive level, discourse analysis of precedent phenomena, taking into account their extra-linguistic dimension; the cognitive projection of the study assumed linguo-cognitive analysis and linguo-cognitive modeling as modeling the structure of meaning, text formation and sense formation based on precedent units. The study provides a discourse analysis of precedent phenomena taking into account their extralinguistic dimension and a liguocognitive analysis in order to model additional meanings and the structure of the meaning of precedent units. The cognitive approach identified the role of extralinguistic knowledge in forming the meaning of the text and the precedent unit. Thematized (invariant) knowledge shared by communicants is the key to the successful interpretation of the precedent unit and the functional effectiveness of the media text. Prospects: in the future, it seems promising to study the corpus of precedent units relevant to professional and citizen journalism, their structure, differences, spheres of functioning, as well as modeling the meaning of precedent units in social networks, memes, and the blogosphere.

The modern analysis of journalist discourse is based on many extralinguistic factors: ethnocultural characteristics of the social environment, creating and sustaining discourse; conditions of political loyalty and the orientation of journalist discourse to the target audience, sources of discourse replenishment and conditions for its self-development in the general discourse-forming environment. These factors have a direct impact on specific ways of delivering information by the authors of the journalistic message to the individual recipient and the mass audience. The relevance of the research is determined, first of all, by the study of the features of the Russian language functioning on the Internet, which fits into the foremost problems of modern Russian studies. The novelty is associated with the analysis of specific ways of linguistic expression of the author’s position in Runet journalism, which have not been specially studied so far. The purpose of the research is to consider the ways of expressing evaluation in the texts of the Runet blogs authors. The article shows that implicit ways of expressing the author’s evaluation in the Runet texts have the same function as any other evaluative statements: to specifically influence the addressee. The studied material shows that the evaluativeness of the Runet blogosphere authors statements, closely interacting with expressiveness and emotionality, depends on their subjective perception of information and helps them express their point of view. The article highlights the implicit ways of expressing the author’s position, which allow in an implicit but understandable form to convey the meaning of the statement to the recipient. The study used materials from Runet blogs, which most vividly and representatively show the features of the Russian-language network journalistic discourse. When working with speech material, analytical methods were used - descriptive (descriptive-analytical) and contrastive, which revealed the linguistic specifics of journalistic discourse, identified and interpreted intra-contextual and intertextual connections, established communication features. The research approaches of discourse analysis and stylistics were also used. The studied material and the results allow to conclude that implicit ways of expressing the author’s position have the same goals as explicit value judgments: they emotionally affect the recipient and accurately convey the meaning of the statement. At the same time, implicitness in the Russian language successfully solves the problem of creating and maintaining the author’s individuality. The prospects for this study are seen in further scientific development of various implicit ways of expressing the author’s position in Runet journalism for further understanding of new processes in the Russian language, in the formation of journalistic discourse and in Russian communication in the digital space.