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Solntseva E.S. [Text model in mass media discourse] World of Science. Series: Sociology, Philology, Cultural Studies, 2020, Vol. 11, No. 2. Available at: https://sfk-mn.ru/PDF/18FLSK220.pdf (in Russian).

Text model in mass media discourse

Solntseva Elena Sergeevna
Saint Petersburg university, Saint Petersburg, Russia
E-mail: shelestelena@yandex.ru

Abstract. The paper presents the model of a journalistic text based on its thematic structure. It reveals the peculiarities of the text structure within the mass media discourse and determines the thematic development of a key event in the text, a perspective in which the authors of a journalistic article present their material. The example article “Japan’s Economy Shrank Sharply. Now Comes the Coronavirus” is taken from The New York Times and it touches upon the most notorious problem of the beginning 2020. Since the unity of the theme provides a global coherence of text and discourse as an overtext formation it is possible to perceive a text as a combination of several topics, the development of which is interconnected. The development of the main topic in the text is rarely linear, most often it is a combination of several subtopics, each of them develops according to its own scheme, and fancifully intertwined, they create a convex text space. The methodology of the investigation provides a fundamental for combination of both mathematical and linguistic methods. The nouns from the heading of the analysed mass media article are followed as key words throughout the text, their synonyms and a wider context are investigated and thus the thematic development of the article is identified. Therefore, the novelty of the approach is in this particular combination of methods. The thematic structure in the analysed article is represented here in the form of a braid where the main topics “Japan’s economy” and “coronavirus” with their subtopics “recession”, “storm”, “tax increase”, “tourism”, “outbreak” etc. are repeated and united with the subtopic “China”. Text modeling can help to find the pattern and pragmatic focus in the text and therefore in the way we think, we understand and spread our information. The investigation seems prospective because of the possibility it opens to further comparison of text models in different languages.

Keywords: text model; topic modeling; mass media discourse; methodology of mass media discourse analysis; medialinguistics; journalistic text; English

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