МАКРОСТРУКТУРА НОВОСТНОГО МЕДИАТЕКСТА: ДИСКУРСИВНЫЙ ПОДХОД

Introduction. The concept of textual macrostructure is used today in various meanings. It was introduced by T.A. van Dijk and used by him in relation to the news discourse. This term “makes explicit the overall topics or themes of a text and at the same time defines what we could call the overall coherence of a text as well as its upshot or gist” [4, P. 129].

Later this concept got a broader interpretation. For example A.N. Baranov defines a macrostructure as “a way of designing and at the same time structuring of the content of the text by using both verbal and non-verbal tools (separation of text fragments, or elements of its macrostructure, by means of visually recognizable visual elements – indentation, lines of various thickness and colour, spaces, background etc.)” [2, P. 294].

In German studies the terms micro- / macrotext and the corresponding micro- / macrostructure are generally accepted, although their understanding by different authors does not coincide. So O.I. Moskalskaya understands by macrotext “a whole speech work – a text, i.e. the text in the broad sense of the word” [9, P. 13], while A.E. Goncharova and I.P. Shishkin mean by macrostructures, in fact, such units of the text as, for example, a paragraph [3, P. 73]. Franz Zimmler defines macrostructures as “language formations that lie beyond the sentence and possess a distinctive function in relation to other similar or hierarchically smaller units (for example, types of sentences)” [quoted after 11, P. 270].

Discussion. To substantiate our understanding of the macrostructure let us return to the Van Dijk's concept. He uses the concept of macrostructure as applied to the discursive aspect of the text, differentiating it from compositional and linguo-stylistic text organization (formal superstructures and rhetorical structures) [4, P. 130-133]. In our opinion the concept of macrostructure can also be extended to the composition of the text and its stylistic formation. Such an opportunity appears as part of the concept of discourse as “a speech dipped into the life” [1, P. 137]. In the framework of this approach, which considers the contextual factors of speech generation, the text appears as a “projection”, or “product” of institutional discourse, “a product of the process of text production” [12, P. 24]. According to E.S. Kubryakova the text “is created in the discourse and is its brainchild” [8], therefore the discursive factors seem to “permeate” the text at all levels of its organization, determining its style and composition.

From there, the macro-textual structure, or macrostructure of the text can be defined as a general scheme of its formal-semantic organization, which is determined by discourse and manifested in the compositional and stylistic formation of the text. In other words, the particular linguostylistic features of the text are derived from its macrostructure, which is in its turn derived from the type of discourse within which the text is generated.

In general terms we propose to consider the macrostructure of the text as a combination of Macro-Textual Positions (MTP), relevant for discursive and linguistic-stylistic aspects of text formation. MTPs are of a potential nature and acquire real “filling” in each particular text. The set and the combination of positions is determined by the type of discourse within which the text is generated. So, for example, for the news discourse of the press three main MTPs can be distinguished, which include a number of subpositions: 1. Headline↔Text – the relationship between the semantic structure of the headline and the factual information of the text. 2. Composition: a) compositional-factual relations – reflection in the text composition of the structure of the event; b) compositional-logical relations – organization of intra-textual logical-syntactic relations between factual blocks; c) compositional-syntagmatic relations – the sequence of presentation of factual blocks. 3. Stylistic perspective – the sort of prevailing stylistic tools, the constancy or variability of the stylistic nuance of the text.

In the following paragraphs we are explaining briefly the determinacy of the exposed positions by the parameters of the press news discourse.

Headline↔Text. The compartment of these relations to the separate position is obvious even by the sketchy knowledge of  news discourse. Alone a panorama of news headlines can create either a clear informational “picture of the day”, or mislead the recipient through the sensationalism of “pseudo-events” and different kinds of misrepresentations, which are composed by means of special methods of headline constructing. In the first case the informativity of the headlines is provided by the isomorphism of the semantic structure of the heading and the text, and the absence of additional modality tools in the linguistic structure of the headline. In the second case the misrepresentation of information is made by way of various transformations of the main text content during the construction of the headline proposition [10].

Compositional-factual relations directly “connect” the text with the event and the situation of reality, interpreted as news. T. van Dijk identified the following compositional components, or, in his terminology, the “semantic categories” of news: main event, time, location, causes/reasons, motivation, context, history, conditions, consequences, details, participants, results, reactions [4, P. 245]. The referential value of these components is different: the representation of general structure of the event (main event), specification of the components of the event (location, time, participants, details), connecting of the event and its components with the context (history, causes, reactions), emphasizing of certain components of the event and its contextual connections (commentary, related facts etc.). The pragmatic markedness of the given blocks intensifies in the direction from the first to the last while the intention of informing weakens in this direction and the subjective interpretation intensifies. For example the mentioning of the causes of the event implicitly contains the subjective assessment, since the causes of the same phenomenon can be interpreted differently in different “coordinate systems”. The most pragmatically marked is the commentary containing an explicitly expressed assessment of the events and which is actively penetrating today into the news genres of mass media.

While the compositional-factual relations structure the information in the plane of “reality – text”, compositional-logical relations presuppose the organization of intra-textual logical relations between factual blocks, which, in fact, are “projected” onto the structure of the reference event, forming its mental image by the reader. The use of different types of logical relations (conjunction, disjunction, negation, implication etc. – in terms of symbolic logic) and in some degree corresponding to them syntactic junctions (conjunctions, disjunctions, contrajunctions and subordination [7, P. 67]) enables to structure the factual information variously, placing emphasis on its different components. In the referential-pragmatic sense the relations of conjunction are the least marked, the most marked are causative implications. Between them lie various types of disjunction and negation, the degree of which markedness varies depending on the text content.

Compositional-syntagmatic relations reflect the “distribution” of the communicative value of compositional blocks and logical relations in the linear sequence of text. They provide the compositional strengthening / weakening of the factual components of events through their placing in a strong or weak text position. For a news text the unmarked “standard” of this sequence is the location of the main fact at the beginning of the news item, followed by the details in the subsequent text (the so-called “inverted pyramid”). Moving forward to the strong textual position of other compositional blocks than the main fact provides the focusing of the recipient's attention on the components of event that are pragmatically significant for the sender of news information.

The stylistic perspective is, in fact, what can be described as functional-stylistic or genre features of a text, implying the lexical, syntactic and other level tools of the language [5, P. 75-122], [6]. It is usual to attribute these tools to the “microlevel” of the text, however in their entirety they are able to change the modality of the whole message according to the discursive intentions of the sender of information, therefore this position can be considered as macro-textual one.

Conclusion. The presented model of macrostructure permits to consider the news media text as a “product” of discourse and to analyze it in the aggregate of its compositional, semantic and linguostylistic organization. These aspects constitute the macro-textual positions, the filling of which in each particular text determines its communicative-pragmatic effect.