FUNCTIONAL AND PRAGMATIC ASPECT OF CELEBRITY GOSSIP TEXTS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE MASS MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

Background. The importance of rumours in communicative processes characteristic of contemporary information society has significantly increased due to their functionality. The communicative-textual nature of rumors calls for their detailed study within the framework of linguistics.

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to investigate specific features of the functional and pragmatic level of celebrity gossip genre text representations in Anglophone media discourse.

Materials and methods. The target of research is media rumours exemplified by celebrity gossip genre being a typical constituent within modern English-language media communicative space.

The methodological basis of the paper is a discourse-oriented approach involving a set of methods inherent in the discourse-analysis system.

Results. The study of celebrity gossip texts on the basis of the classical genre model including topical, structural and stylistic levels reveals that in the discourse context their genre-discursive characteristics are determined by the multiplicity of their authors’ intentions. One of the dominant intentions proves to be the impact intent implemented by the leading discursive strategy of convincing the addressee of the reliability of the information transmitted. This strategy is determined by the pragmatic focus of structural-compositional and semantic-stylistic components.

The synergetic effect caused by combining a wide range of expressive language means and typical structural forms of information journalistic genres ensures the existence of hybrid non-evidential discourse aimed at an unexamining addressee in the vast mass media communicative space.

Practical implications. The results of the research can be used when creating a linguistic model of rumors.