Publicistic style exists in 2 forms:-oral;-written

Essays and articles published in newspapers and magazines belong to the written form. And speeches, radio and TV commentaries, radio and TV talk shows belong to its oral form. The function of this style is to inform readers and listeners, to influence the public opinion, to convince the audience of smth and to express the point of view in an article or speech.

Public speeches

1) Being an oral form of publicistic style it contains some peculiarities of oral speeches which are directed to the audience *Ladies and gentlemen *Honorable members

2) The use of contracted forms *I’m, you’re, don’t

3) Use of colloquial words, use of the 1^st and 2^nd personal pronouns. Importance of standard pronunciation

4) The use of intonation to express shades of meaning, implication, different emotions. Also gestures and mimics play a great role.

In its leading features public speeches belong to the written variety of the language, thus they have the form of the monologue. Lexically there are lots of bookish words and some terms, very often the use of figurative language. In order to appeal to the emotions of the listeners, speakers resort to phraseological units, metaphors, similes, allusions, irony. But all stylistic devices used in speech are dead, so that the listeners won’t have any difficulties in understanding them and can easily get at the idea. Compositionally the text is logically constructed; the message is expressed clearly with argumentative power.

Syntactical constructions are not very much complicated and there are a lot of connectives, which link the idea of the speaker. Among syntactical stylistic devices most frequent one are: repetitions and rhetorical questions.

Written style

Newspaper articles, media articles.

A newspaper serves to inform and to convince the reader. It’s meant for different kinds of audience, people who differ in their background, education and culture. A newspaper is often read in places where it’s hard to concentrate: in the undergrounds or at lunch, during a break. The process of reading is often broken off. All these factors impose certain rules on creating a newspaper text. A media text should be understandable to everyone. It’s supposed to arouse the reader’s interest at once and keep it throughout the article and the main information should be imparted in a short concise and expressive way. A media article has the structure of an inverted pyramid and the information is presented according to the top-down relevant principles. The most important information is imparted in the headline and the 1^st sentence.

(45) General features of media articles (MA)

1) MA abound in proper names (people, geographical places, numerals)

2) Newspaper articles contain a great number of bookish words, abstract words, and economic and political terms.

3) Newspaper clichйs are widely used. They are stable, easily recognizable and understandable. *to step down

*to come to force

4) Lots of abbreviations and clipped forms are used to contribute conciseness

5) Abbreviations may stand for geographical places and well-known public figures.

6) Abbreviation and clipping must be well-known to the reader or explained in the text

7) A newspaper is very sensitive to everything new in the life of society therefore lots of neologisms have come into existence in mass media *long-haired

8) Some newspaper articles are written in a very expressive way. They are rich in various stylistic devices: epithets, irony, similes, metaphors, punning, and allusions. But they are all dead.

9) In syntax some news items may be very complicated. It usually refers to the news article.

The content may be expressed in 1 or 2 sentences, which are very long with a number of infinitive, participial, gerundial and nominative constructions.

10) The rules of sequences of tenses is not observe.

11) MAs contain plenty of quotations of direct speech, which may be presented without inverted commas. The content of quotations may be transformed for some purposes and supplied with ironic commas of a journalist.

(46) Newspaper headlines

The aim of headlines is informational. That is to express the content of an article in a short form and besides the other function is expressive, because the aim is to attract the reader’s attention. And these 2 functions have grammatical and syntactical features.

1) Articles are often omitted.*Long trip in strange car for 2 Frenchmen

2) Omission of the verb to be *Lost Botticelli unveiled

3) Present simple is used to refer to smth that has happened, is happening or happens regularly.*Somali gunman attacks British tourists in Kenya

4) To refer to the future the infinitive is used *Britain to spend more a cancer research

5) The possessive case is preferred to the off phrase *Muslim women struggle to wear what they like

6) Attributive use of nouns. 3,4,5 nouns may be put together into a sort of block with all the nouns except the last functioning as attribute *Bread Price Rise Shock

7) As far as the vocabulary is concerned here certain words keeps repeated in headlines. These recurring words are often short, one syllable words colored by expressive and evaluative shades of meaning *pledge-promise

8) Info is combined with appraisal. There are various stylistically colored words, pins, transformed idioms. Use of abbreviations and initials.

Syntactically the most widely used structure is an elliptical sentence, which is laconic and concise on the one hand and expressive on the other hand. Other syntactical structures employed are statements, nominative sentences, questions, quotations and direct speech.

Graphically punctuation marks are widely used, especially a dash.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1144