STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF THE NOMINATIVE SPHERE “WEATHER” OF ONLINE NARRATIVE IN WEATHER NEWS STORIES (ON THE MATERIAL OF BRITISH ELECTRONIC NEWSPAPERS)

Abstract

The systemic organization of lexical units in the nominative sphere “WEATHER” in online narrative of weather news stories is traced in its hierarchical structure. As a result of the analysis of the actual material, the following components of the nominative sphere “WEATHER’ are highlighted: sub-sphere “SEASONS” and sub-sphere “WEATHER CATASTROPHES”. The sub-sphere “SEASONS” includes the nominates of weather phenomena of abnormal (not typical) events for a specific season. The sub-sphere “WEATHER CATASTROPHES” consists of lexical units that implement the nominations of disasters, extremes and catastrophes caused by the weather regardless of time periods / calendar cycles. According to its structure, the nominative sub-sphere “SEASONS” is not heterogeneous, since it contains both direct and indirect weather nominations. The sub-sphere “SEASONS” is formed on the semantic basis of “time”. In this context, the weather is perceived as an integral part of a habitat for people, whose interest is manifested in atypical manifestations of the weather in view of the temporal frames. At each linguistic level of the nominative sub-sphere “SEASONS”, there are certain nominations, the use of which in online narrative is determined by the evaluation model “Good-Typical”, “Bad-Abnormal”. The characteristic feature of the periphery of the sub-sphere “WEATHER CATASTROPHES” is the anthropocentric character of weather catastrophes, the nominations of which are realized weather news stories in two main directions: the nominations of human emotions caused by weather catastrophes; lexical structures with a special emotional and expressive colouring highlighting the horror of weather extremes.