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SPECIFIC CHARACTER OF INFLUENCE AND MANIPULATION FUNCTIONS REALISATION IN AN ENGLISH POLITICAL ESSAY // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2018. Issue 7 (196). P. 9-14

In recent years the spread of information warfare has encouraged increasing interest to influencing and manipulative capacity of media. In this regard it appears to be relevant to analyse how this capacity is realized in different publicistic texts. The article aims to illuminate the function specific of a political essay. A political essay combines features of publicistic and newspaper styles. Newspaper style determines realization of informative function while publicistic style – influence function. Those functions are realized through objective and subjective modality respectively. The author uses influence function to impose on readers his ideas and positions, which he does openly and directly. Usually these ideas are stated in the title of the essay and the essay itself is devoted to it. The analysis implies that the influence function is most commonly represented by metaphors, emotionally loaded words and epithets. A political essay is also influenced by the political discourse, which is highly manipulative by its nature. So political discourse makes influence function evolve into manipulation one. The author manipulates when he does not want to reveal his position and tries to indistinguishably force it on readers. That is why the author uses manipulation function to communicate ideas, which are not openly stated and usually are not mentioned in the title or subtitle of the essay.

Keywords: political essay, publicistic style, political discourse, manipulation function, influences function, subjective and objective modality

“EDITORIAL” AS A GENRE OF ENGLISH BROADSHEETS // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2022. Issue 3 (221). P. 56-66

Introduction. The article aims at indicating and describing generic characteristics of the editorial. Aim. The aim of the article is to reveal specifics of the editorial as a separate genre. For this socio-cultural environment of the genre was described as well as the main function and generic characteristic. Material and methods. The materials of the study are 50 editorial texts published in English broadsheets the Economist, the Independent, the Washington Post, the Guardian from 2016 to 2021. A complex of methods was used to analyze the material, namely tools of discursive, stylistic, lexical, grammatical and syntax analysis. Results and discussion. The editorial plays a significant role in socio-political sphere, as the positions stated in the text can affect public values and opinion; the editorial enables to preserve balance of opinion, essential for mass media. As a result of the analysis we concluded that the editorial can be characterized as a separate genre based on the unity of theme, style and composition. We indicated the following generic characteristics of the editorial: 1) unified structure, which consists of the introduction, the main body and the conclusion. The latter plays a significant role and includes recommendations (the most common one – 75% cases), forecast (23% cases), evaluation (the least common one – 4 % cases) or a combination of the abovementioned conclusions; 2) from the stylistic perspective informal speech, argumentation, authorial nominations and intertextuality are distinctive for the editorial; 3) characterized by a variety of topics, the editorial is aimed at analyzing a narrow specialized issue.

Keywords: editorial, mass media, broadsheets, genre