ТИПЫ РЕЧЕВОЙ СТРУКТУРЫ ГИПЕРТЕКСТА

Introduction

Advanced digital technologies and new multimedia platforms have revolutionized the production of media information that caused changes in its speech representation [9, P. 58]. The creating drivers of informational event dialectics are “not only technologies for promoting media content, but also semantic-identifying resources of discursive media texts—verbal, visual, and hybrid expressive means of imagery” [4]. Communication is developing dynamically in the context of transmedia—a site and social networks. The content of the latter is often generated not by editors, but users.

In modern Russian and Western linguistics, studies of how new technologies are rebuilding the media ecosystem by influencing the audience’s consumption of information and methods of constructing and representing the media reality in digitalization have become relevant [12]. The digital medium is also considered as a qualitatively new type of information interaction. The purpose of the proposed article consists in revealing linguistically relevant characteristics of the speech structure of media electronic representation, in particular, features of hypertextuality.

Literature review

In media linguistics, hypertext is defined as a set of messages that are united by a common topic and differ in a source and time of allocating on the Web, with transitions from one message to another being supported technically [2, P. 179]. A media fact on the news feed serves as a means of navigation, which consists in the fact’s ability to be a link and take the user to the requested information—a subheading and then a full text. Not only news, but also other Internet materials are equipped with the ability to belong to the textual aggregate and, therefore, have a property of hypertextuality. The field of any text is expanded by hyperlinks to adjacent network texts about mentioned persons, dates, events, institutions, etc.

A hypertext integrates links of various media formats—sites, television channels, radio broadcasts, and social networks. It is also considered to be a method of non-linear presentation of information on web pages linked by mutual links into a single text [8]. Broadly defined, most of the pages of Internet sites belong to one hypertext that is unreadable. This is one of the reasons that a media man’s (homo mediatus) world view is fragmented [1], and the fragments are connected by not cause-and-effect relationships, but associative words. However, despite the unlimited hypertext, the choice of links is not random. For example, in the online discourse of English-speaking media (British and American), links to publications in other languages are extremely rare; in the hypertext of high-quality publications, it is impossible to build a search path that would lead to a tabloid, etc.

In this regard, there has been established correlation between the subjective reality of an individual and “his” hypertext. In other words, a media person is what he consumes online. This fact was adopted by Internet marketing experts. Tracking user requests, they make up a set of advertised target products. By analogy, a conclusion has been drawn about the person’s subjective reality that, obviously, corresponds to the content read, listened and viewed, since the person chooses only what he is interested in. So we can talk about the hypertext of a particular individual.

The degree of the recipient's involvement into hypertext depends on his activity that determines the self-developing hyperstructure. Within its frame, the categories of retrospection and prospection provide the necessary degree of linearity of the topic’s development [2, P. 180]. The speech representations of these categories are examined in detail by L.R. Duskayeva (2014). As the recipient's interest in the topic fades, his activity is leveled and the development of a hypertext is interrupted. Since media producers have the task of keeping the Internet consumer as long as possible, they use various ways of creating and maintaining intrigue—tension—in a hypertext, primarily due to portioning information in accordance with the hypothetical requests of the audience.

Results

The most striking example of a recent hypertext is the media event “Coronavirus COVID-19” that received a status of an independent topic along with the news of culture, sports, science, business, health, etc., essentially replacing them, since it had a dramatic impact on every segment of people’s lives.

The study of the content of various platforms showed that sites are equipped with different links. News is most often accompanied by topic independent links to other materials in the current issue, or to the most read materials of this platform. However, despite the development of the hypertext, the topic does not expand. This structure of the hypertext is used by information sites that do not set themselves the task of in-depth study of a problem.

More effective, in our opinion, are topic associated links to posts in this or another platform. For example, a text

Российский космонавт показал «Глаз Сахары» [11] – [A Russian spaceman showed the “Eye of the Sahara” – N.P.]

dwells on

Олег Кононенко сделал фотографии с помощью обычной камеры на Международной космической станции [Ibid]. – [Oleg Kononenko who took photographs using an ordinary camera on the International Space Station].

The media fact contains a link to photographs depicting a part of the Sahara desert—a unique geological structure, a large crater with a flat bottom with a diameter of 50 kilometers, resembling a human eye. Further, it is proposed to follow the link and see a gallery of photographs taken by another astronaut, Sergei Ryazansky, who created one of the largest galleries of images of the Earth from space during his staying at the International Space Station. Moreover, at the end of the text, there is a section Это тоже интересно – [Here’s what you need to know], including clickable links: How the “Pillars of Creation” look in a new light (photo); Astronauts on Earth: how they train; and Roscosmos showed an ice crater on Mars [Ibid]. The More about space section further expands the topic through links to texts in this information platform: How Russia will “capture” the Moon; See what Hubble saw on your birthday. New service from NASA; and Astronauts on Earth: rare shots (photo) [Ibid].

Of greater interest is a problem associated hypertext structure in The New York Times online. We analyzed the feature How Native Americans Are Fighting a Food Crisis [15] as an example. Here, the author posed a problem of Coronavirus having restricted access to food and found out, how Native Americans rely on customs, such as seed preservation and canning that helped their ancestors survive in difficult times. In each paragraph of the feature, a word or several are highlighted, indicating a particular phenomenon, worth of clarification, explanation, or additional information that creates an associative background, a more complete picture of what is narrated in the article.

For the roughly 20,000 members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation - a vast, two million-acre expanse in southern South Dakota - social distancing is certainly feasible [Ibid].

The marked link connects the reader with the Oglala Sioux Tribe website that is intended only for Tribal Members, which characterizes it as a closed society that does not welcome strangers. Further in the feature, there are links to sites of other North American tribes of St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, Quapaw Nation, San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation and others. All of them correspond to this characteristic and indirectly indicate a racial problem in the country.

Getting to food has long been a challenge for Pine Ridge residents. For a lot of people, the nearest grocery store is a two-hour drive away. Many rely on food stamps or the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, a federal initiative that provides boxes of food (historically lacking in healthy options) to low-income families [Ibid].

The links in this part of the feature lead the reader to an official website of the US government that offers a program for distributing traditional food products on Indian reservations and a feature in another publishing platform about cutting the Assistance Program benefits, replacing half of the benefits with boxes of government-purchased nonperishable foods. The information, available to the reader through the links, puts him/her in the picture of the problem and gives an idea of a difficult environment of the Indians in America that the author does not have to pay attention to.

The Coronavirus worsened the situation with food provision of the tribe. In this regard, there is a link to a feature on infection cases among Indians:

The coronavirus crisis - one case has been reported on the reservation - has only made access to food harder [Ibid].

Here the text is interrupted by a thematic section, offering contextual links about the US pandemic: Latest Updates: Coronavirus Outbreak in the U.S.; President Trump halts W.H.O. payments, while governors offer tentative visions for a new normal; Bill Gates joins chorus condemning Trump decision to suspend W.H.O. funding; and More live coverage: Global Markets New York [Ibid].

The analyzed feature that is a real case study provides a number of links to the websites of various funds aimed at helping Native Americans and youth organizations Slim Buttes Agricultural Development Program; Superfund sites; Intertribal Agriculture Council; Running Strong for American Indian Youth [Ibid] and others. These links inform readers who is in need.

Big-box stores and processed foods have eroded some of the old customs. But now, faced with a disrupted food system, many Native Americans are looking to those traditions for answers [Ibid].

This media fact contains a link to another feature in the New York Times about the food culture and traditions of the tribe.

After much of his work dried up, Brian Yazzie, a private chef in St. Paul who is Navajo, decided to volunteer at the Gatherings Café in Minneapolis, which is feeding Native American seniors. He is cooking almost exclusively with traditional Native ingredients, making stew out of tepary beans from Ramona Farms in Sacaton, Ariz., And cooking elderberries into a sauce for barbecue chicken [Ibid].

The fragment offers a link to the chef’s personal website, where he focuses on bringing together hyper-local ingredients from the rivers and forests to revitalize healthy indigenous cuisine, a link to information about a public Gatherings Café that encourages healthy living and eating due to ancestral knowledge, and a link to a site of Ramona Farms known for producing traditional foods for the Indians.

In addition to the text links, there are links to related features The Movement to Define Native American Cuisine and In Canada, Hunting and Preserving an Indigenous Way of Life [Ibid] at the end of the page.

Thus, we can see wide branching of the hypertext that is not limited to the links on this page, but extends further in a specific topic or problem intended for the target audience and not for an occasional user. This type of hyperlinks has potential to provide the longest and most branched hypertext path. But the real performance ability should be investigated with non-linguistic methods applied.

Discussion

In the context of hypertext, the clickbait phenomenon deserves special attention. Linguistic studies showed that headings play a special role here. In network services, they are constructed in accordance with epistemic curiosity and are aimed at making an attractive representation of actuality that performs a meaning-modeling function, for example,

Why some Nigerians are gloating about Covid-19 [10];

David Cameron: 'I wanted to believe Andy Coulson over hacking' [14].

The meaning-making implies the idea that the heading starts the receptive mechanism of curiosity gaps that makes a person seek to understand the understatement or a hint and to calm the “informational urge” [13; 6, P. 356-357].

Psycholinguistics claim, the heading, having compressed the content, activates the receptive mechanism of inter- and intrasensory transfer that allows reconstructing the structure of a large text array [3, P. 158–159]. Appealing to the communicative interests of the recipient, the heading allows him to make a decision on further actions based on the forecast of the subsequent content, i.e., to ignore the extension or go to the text via a hyperlink [6, P. 356]. Consequently, the media fact on the news feed informs, navigates, persuades, and determines the further actions of the Internet user. A similar cognitive mechanism works when any opportunity arises to expand electronic text.

Studies of the audience’s interests found that in the context of the Internetization of life, not only news ceases to be a media content. This concept gains everyday meaning and includes any new knowledge—movie trailers, information about actors’ lives, a new photo of a friend on a social network, a recipe, advertising, comments by journalists, politicians, businessmen in social networks, etc. [7, P. 19-20; 5]. Therefore, well-functioning information media formats and platforms allow deepening and broadening the audience’s involvement in the message issue as well as make the content personalized and media fact more effective and pertinent.

Conclusion

The conducted study revealed three types of hypertextuality in the speech structure of a network media fact, i.e., topic independent links, topic associated links, and problem associated links. The latter has the greatest potential for the development of a hypertext and effective internalization of facts of the media discourse. The real ability in terms of its performance is investigated with non-linguistic techniques applied.