Communicative-pragmatic study of media phenomena: a review of dissertations

Abstract

Communicative and pragmatic research, which, in fact, goes back to ancient rhetoric as the doctrine of effective communication, is still in the focus of attention of linguists, media theorists and media practitioners today. The issues facing media researchers, on the one hand, are of a broader nature, on the other hand, have naturally shifted from the essence of verbal communication to the area of technologies, forms and formats, that is, towards extralinguistic factors.

Our goal was to present an overview of dissertations devoted to the communicative-pragmatic analysis of media phenomena. We found 13 dissertations that meet the specified substantive and time parameters. The work used the methods corresponding to the set goal: observation (used when selecting scientific sources, in the process of formulating conclusions); comparison (used in the process of comparing various scientific sources), generalization and systematization (in the process of deriving common features of observed scientific objects, general system approaches to their consideration); analysis and synthesis (in the process of studying research literature, deriving criteria for considering scientific papers); description (with a holistic view of the features of the objects under study). A review of dissertation research devoted to the communicative-pragmatic analysis of media allowed us to come to the following main conclusions: 1) in dissertations of this kind, discourse-centric and anthropocentric vectors manifested themselves: the authors of the works are interested in the communicative pragmatics of media texts, media discourses and their structural elements, media images, as well as the communicative pragmatics of the media linguistic personality; 2) for adequate conduct of communicative-pragmatic analysis, specialists substantiate certain individual parameters (adequacy of translation; motivation for choosing the addressee; conflict of media communication; openness of impact; politeness in the nationally marked speech activity of a journalist) or systems of criteria that allow us to fully assess and describe the communicative-pragmatic potential of the media objects under study; 3) for discourse-centric studies, a system of features/indicators is relevant: media, genre, thematic and structural-semantic, communicative-strategic, lingua-stylistic.

Acknowledgments:  The study was carried out with the financial support of the Advanced Scientific Research Foundation of Chelyabinsk State University (№ 126-1 of 2024)