Figurative expressions in television announcements

Abstract

This paper focuses on studying the specific features of using figurative expressions in the texts of television announcements based on the usage of words in a figurative sense aimed at enhancing pictorialism and expressiveness of oral speech. Various uses of tropes, nonce words and set phrases in the texts of modern television announcements. The figurative media mentioned are shown to contribute to implementing a journalistic strategy of a language game, which can greatly influence the mindset of a general audience.

Today television journalism is undergoing dramatic changes. Not just the genre structure of modern television discourse is subject to transformation, but each individual genre as well. The need for highlighting linguistic stylistic peculiarities of promo genres that previously were given a brief account of (in particular the analysis of figurative meanings that have become a popular mechanism for creating a language game in the texts of television announcements) seems to be quite topical. This article offers an in-depth analysis of figurative expressions in texts of television announcements in light of communicative stylistics of journalistic speech. A journalist as an author consciously selects particular means to fulfill his/her communicative task using the resources of the Russian language. The psychology of his/her audience taken into account, the phenomenon of a language game may be considered as a psycholinguistic phenomenon. Through a language game, an implicit impact on the mass audience is produced.

This article makes a significant contribution to modern scientific media stylistics and opens up broad prospects for the research of modern television genres included in the so-called promo discourse, and can be widely used in education syllabus within the course of television language, speech culture, media linguistics, media psychology, etc.