Science and environment discourse on English news sites (ID:185389)

CHAPTER I. Linguistic representation science and environment discourse on English news sites 1.1 The Approaches to the definition of Discourse In modern linguistics, there is no ultimate definition of what discourse is. The term originates from Latin discursus meaning running about or movement and referring to conversation in the Late Latin [13]. Today the notion of discourse possesses various meanings, thus our first step is to figure out all the categories that the term discourse can comprise and find the most suitable meaning for our further investigation. In order to conduct this differentiation we follow several approaches: Structural approach The term discourse was initially introduced by Zellig Harris in 1952 in the article Discourse Analysis where he proposed to extend the description of isolated sentences to connected speech. In a structure above sentence level, the occurrence of particular distinguishable elements, e.g. morphemes, enabled the researcher to obtain more information from the text revealing not only “what a text is saying, but how it is saying” [8]. The particular patterns of occurrence of its chief morphemes could then be discovered for a particular person, subject matter, culture, and so on. Though focusing exclusively on the formal aspects of the text, the study of a structure stretching beyond the limits of a single sentence at a time was the first glimpse on discourse paving the way to correlating language and culture. Situational approach brings into focus the communicative situation in which a text is created. Discourse is regarded as text encircled into a situation. Text is discourse minus situation accordingly. Text is an abstract composite realized in discourse by means of linguistic units [11]. The first step to treating discourse as situational occurrence was made by T. F. Mitchell in his pioneering article The Language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica [6] which contained analysis of speech functions, participants, and physical environment of a particular speech event. In the next couple of decades nothing new was added to this statement until the publication of Handbook of Discourse Analysis by Teun A. van Dijk [12]. It was a mature work that described discourse in the whole, with its situational peculiarities and expansion way beyond not only sentence but text level. Text has two possible variants of segmentation: pragmatic and contextual. In discourse-analysis segmenting the whole into large components is the study of macrostructure which is a sequence of units larger than utterance. It is a general discourse outline created by the addressee in comprehension. Every communicational situation has its constituents which are the roles that people take, the message of the communication, medium and the setting, the feedback and circumstances that interfere with transmitting the information. The participants of a communicative situation are the speaker (a person speaking in order to transmit information) and the addressee (a person who perceives or receives the information from the speaker). The message is a piece of information that is being communicated. The code is the form that a message takes. The role of the speaker is to encode the message, while the role of the addressee is to decode it. The setting of communication is the context. The setting includes time and place of communication, the number of participants, the topic of discussion and the style of speech in use. The feedback is a sign that the message is understood by the addressee. The things that bring distortion into communication are referred to as the noise. Practice-based approach is focused on the person that creates discourse by means of linguistic units. Any participant of communication is language personality [4] seen as a set of human abilities and characteristics underlying production and reception of a text [5]. In this vein, discourse is practice through which language personality is realized. There are two vital aspects of this approach: Firstly, discourse is a process and outcome of the speaker’s activity. Secondly, discourse practice reveals peculiarities of activity of the speaker along with mediatization. Text from the perspective of its functionality is understood as language realization of the author’s ideas [11]. The complicated integrity of speech and extralingual aspects required for text understanding and which present glimpses of members of communication, their aims, conditions of producing and receiving messages is defined as discourse [3]. In order to explain the difference between Mediated and Mediatized Discourse we refer to the typology of discourse. In modern linguistics discourse is treated as result and practice simultaneously. Cotemporary scholars regard discourse to be not only a phenomenon to be carefully studied, but also a strategic means in transmitting messages. It was practical usage rather than the structure of discourse that has been analysed lately. It is the participants of communication that create discourse by means of linguistic units. 1.2 The notion of Mass media discourse Nowadays mass media plays an important role for each member of our society. The concept of "discourse of the mass media" refers to the problematic field of mass communication as a process of information exchange between all the subjects of society, aimed at shaping public opinion about socially significant piece of social existence. This problem has been widely discussed by Western scholars (J. Orwell, T.van Djyk), and the interest in the study of media discourse continues unabated. With the development of the media and the expansion of virtual information, Mass Media has become a widely used topic.