ИСТИНА

Dramatic growth of speech and text production in the sphere of mass communication in the second half of the XX and the beginning of the XXI centuries was accompanied by an increasing amount of academic research dealing with various aspects of language functioning in the media – from special characteristics of the news texts to particulars of language usage in Internet blogs and social networks. This new dynamically developing research area attracted representatives of practically all branches of linguistics: sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, specialists in discourse analysis, cultural studies etc. So by the year 2000 the overall situation in media language studies created all necessary preconditions for the emergence of a new full-fledged branch of linguistics, i.e. media linguistics, which incorporated all previous achievements in the field. The review of contemporary studies of language in the media allows to outline a relatively stable thematic structure of the discipline, which covers the following key topics: 1) Defining the status of media language within the framework of contemporary linguistic studies, and its description in terms of a basic paradigm: language-speech, text –discourse. 2) Functional stylistic differentiation of media discourse, classification of media texts on the basis of different sets of criteria: implementation of language functions, media channel (the print media, radio, television and Internet). 3) Media speech typology, the spectrum of the media texts’ types and genres, description of the main types of media texts: news, comment and analysis, features and advertising. 4) Lexical, syntactic and stylistic analysis of the language of media texts. 5) Discourse analysis of the media texts, including their production, transmission, perception, social and cultural context, ideological and political factors, interpretative potential of the media speech practices and culture-specific traits. 6) Manipulative potential of the media language, verbal and media techniques used for persuasion in advertising, propaganda, public relations and information management, various means of the implementation of ideological component. 7) Comparative studies of media language in different cultural and political contexts, or comparative media linguistics. However it should be noted that the above list remains open, as it is always the case with every quickly growing branch of knowledge.