Literary and Journalistic Texts: An Overview
Literary Texts
Literary language deviates from standard language to create beauty and surprise, capturing the reader’s attention. It achieves this through content, form, musicality, and literary resources. The concept of literary language emerged in the early 20th century with Russian formalism.
Features of Literary Texts
- Functional: Focuses on aesthetic pleasure and multiple meanings.
- Automatization and Bypass: Employs innovative language, diverging from common usage.
- Poetic Function: Aims to produce aesthetic pleasure through multiple meanings and connotations.
- Lasting: Endures over time.
- Immutable: Cannot be changed.
Factors of Literary Communication
Roman Jakobson’s model includes a sender, receiver, message, historical context, code, and channel.
Forms of Literary Texts
Narrative, poetry, and text can be presented in two forms: prose and verse.
Genres of Literary Texts
Aristotle’s “Poetics” distinguishes three genres: epic (narrative), lyrical, and dramatic. These evolved from Romantic literature.
Literary Resources
These resources enhance the beauty of the text, affecting the phonic, syntactic, and semantic levels. Examples include alliteration and paronomasia (phonic), parallelism, anaphora, and anastrophe (syntactic), and hyperbole, irony, personification, metaphor, and metonymy (semantic).
Journalistic Texts
Journalism’s influence on language is significant. Journalists have a moral obligation to use language correctly, although this isn’t always the case. Media aims to inform, guide, and entertain. Language use varies depending on the objective.
Characteristics of Journalistic Texts
- Correctness: Adherence to standard language usage.
- Conciseness: Essential for conveying information efficiently.
- Structure: Requires specific arrangement of content.
- Clichés: Prone to using idioms, metaphors, and platitudes due to writing urgency.
- Simplicity: Uses short sentences and simple vocabulary for easy understanding.
- Objectivity: Information should be presented impartially.
- Misuse of Language: Includes sensationalism, foreign words, Gallicisms, rumors, euphemisms, and incorrect gerund usage.
Genres of Journalistic Texts
Informative Genres
- News: Reports on a recent event of interest. It’s characterized by brevity and objectivity, focusing on reporting without analysis or commentary. The author should objectively report the events, avoiding subjective adjectives and personal pronouns.
- News Structure: Includes a headline, lead (summarizing the main information), and body (providing details, background, and potential consequences).
- Feature Article: Analyzes circumstances and gathers opinions.
- Interview: Presents a conversation in context. A pure interview reproduces the questions and answers verbatim, while a feature interview includes information about the interviewee, their environment, and their behavior, along with the interviewer’s observations and comments.
Opinion Genres
- Editorial: Expresses the newspaper’s viewpoint on a specific topic.
- Column: Signed opinion piece offering reflections and critiques.
Scientific-Technical Texts
These texts encompass both scientific (pure experimental science) and technical (technological and industrial applications of science) aspects. They aim to report on scientific activity and progress.
Features of Scientific-Technical Texts
- Clarity: Uses well-constructed sentences, avoiding ambiguity.
- Accuracy: Employs precise terminology and avoids subjectivity.
- Verifiability: Statements can be checked for accuracy.
- Universality: Content is understandable globally.
- Objectivity: Prioritizes facts and data over opinions.
- Non-linguistic Codes: Incorporates formulas, symbols, and graphics.
- Borrowings and Neologisms: Includes terms from other languages, especially English.
Linguistic Characteristics of Scientific-Technical Texts
- Morphological: Uses third person, present indicative, and timeless tense. Includes verbal periphrasis of obligation and first-person plural (plural of modesty).
- Syntactic: Primarily uses declarative and interrogative sentences. Employs adjective structures, appositions, passive voice, and impersonal constructions.
- Lexical: Includes jargon (mostly from English), hyponyms, and hypernyms.
Types of Scientific-Technical Texts
Determined by subject matter or receiver specialization.