Journalistic and Literary Texts: Exploring Language and Structure
Journalistic Texts
The Mass Media
Journalism converts events into a one-way process, transmitting objective or subjective messages through a communication channel. This artificial information utilizes various linguistic codes. Opinions must be differentiated from factual information to avoid manipulation.
The Press
Initially the primary means of communication, large companies now own newspapers, radio, and TV. Content comes from sources like news agencies, archives, and documentation. Sorting is done by periodicity, content, geographical coverage, and journalist quality.
Language, Codes, and Genres
Content is organized into sections using linguistic and extralinguistic codes and icons. Evocative language considers the size of informative genres, reviews, and mixed genres.
Style
Standard register aspires to correctness, conciseness, and clarity. Short sentences with logical order, precise lexicon, third-person usage, nominal and passive constructions are common. A personal, expressive, and colloquial style is also sometimes used.
Headlines
Headlines are brief statements highlighting the news, sometimes with a subtitle. They use precise and simple informative sentences and complete noun phrases. Creativity is encouraged with rhetorical devices.
Genres: Reporting
- The News Story: A narrative of current events, often using the inverted pyramid structure (starting with the most important information). It’s structured into an entry and body. The entry provides a concise narrative, while the body details information in descending order of importance. News is objective and impersonal.
- The Report: Develops a news story with an entry and body. Its length and signature are variable, with a more personal, descriptive, and narrative style than news.
- The Interview: A conversation to gather information, statements, or insights into psychology or personality. It’s structured as a dialogue with questions and answers.
Genres: Opinion
- Editorial: Unsigned newspaper reviews of current issues, representing the paper’s stance. It combines exposition and argumentation in a fixed, attractive style, prioritizing objectivity.
- Opinion Article: A signed piece exploring a topic of interest. It offers a variety of topics and arguments with more freedom of style, allowing writers to express their own voice.
- Letters to the Editor: Signed letters from readers, accompanied by identification, addressing various topics with clarity, precision, and correctness.
Mixed Genres
- Feature Story: Combines informational and interpretive elements with a personal perspective. It frames and analyzes issues with various styles and approaches, using narrative, descriptive, and explanatory comments in a free structure.
- Cultural Critique: Examines current cultural events and values, blending information and opinion. Written by specialists, it uses descriptive, expository, and argumentative text.
Literary Texts
The Language of Literature
Writers create fictional worlds through verbal language. Literary language prioritizes the poetic function, using language in a special way to draw attention to itself. Connotative language is predominant, while the referential function is informative. Form departs from common language, using unusual and innovative words and expressions, emphasizing ambiguity and connotative values.
Type and Structure
Literary texts are difficult to distinguish from other types, with structures varying based on tradition and experimentation. External structures include stanzas in poetry, chapters in novels, and scenes and acts in plays. Linguistic forms are carefully crafted, sometimes complex, especially in poetry. The special use of language is due to its unilateral communication, aesthetic objective, and the emphasis on ambiguity and polysemy through connotation.
Rhetorical Figures
Rhetorical figures are the most important resource for diverting language from the everyday, creating the unexpected. They appear more frequently in literary language with artistic intent, affecting all levels of language:
- Phonetic Level: Intentional repetition of sounds and wordplay with similar phonemes (paronomasias).
- Grammatical Level: Anaphora (repeating words at the beginning of lines or phrases), asyndeton (omission of conjunctions), polysyndeton (use of many conjunctions), ellipsis (suppression of elements), gradation (ordering of ideas), hyperbaton (altering syntactic order), and parallelism (repeating lines with the same structure).
- Semantic Level: Antithesis (opposition of words or ideas), metaphor, hyperbole (exaggeration), paradox, personification, synesthesia (associating terms from different senses), irony, periphrasis, and simile.