LINGUISTIC DESCRIPTION OF MODERN CHINESE POLITICAL MEDIA TEXT

This study presents the linguistic analysis of modern Chinese political media texts. The linguistic analysis focuses on the most common features of the lexical and grammatical characteristics of Chinese media texts. The analysis is based on the sampling of the news texts that were covering the events in Ukraine for years 2013–2014. The objective of the research was to identify characteristics that form a political image of the participants of these events.

First of all, based on the evidence of immense practical material, the paper classifies and describes lexical characteristics of political media texts. The author distinguishes and describes such peculiarities as wide use of journalistic clichés and stock phrases, terminology, and proper names. All characteristics are shown in the examples from the newspaper articles.

A specific function is performed by the expressions of implicit and explicit evaluativity, i.e. use of expressive means and the context to express the author’s attitude towards the subject of the media text. The same function is performed by the use of the vocabulary and phraseology in figurative meaning and stylistic contamination or mix of different styles in one text.

The other important peculiarity is a wide use of linguistic opportunities of “wényán”, a written form of Putonghua, based on the linguistic principles of Old Chinese. It is worth mentioning that wényánizms – used both in vocabulary and grammar – have become an inherent part of a correct written text in modern Chinese.

The paper also classifies the data regarding syntactic characteristics of Chinese media texts, describes the most frequent syntactic models. The result of the analysis is not only identification and generalization of the distinctive features of news reports in Chinese, but also the understanding of the fact that contents do not largely influence the essential lexical and grammatical characteristics.