PROGNOSTIC NEWS TEXTS: LINGUISTIC RHETORIC PECULIARITIES

Abstract

Typical news texts report on events that occurred in the past or are developing in the present. The purpose of the article is to identify linguistic and rhetorical peculiarities of prognostic news texts describing future events, the potential development of which is based on the author’s assumptions, logical conclusions, and expert opinions, in order to convince the target audience of the veracity of the journalist’s predictions. The persuasive status of prognostic news texts allows us to analyse them by implementing a linguistic-rhetorical approach. It takes into account morphosyntactic constructions as pairings of form and meaning, fixed in the long-term memory of a language speaker, used to represent ideas in different blocks of the news text in order to verbally influence the addressee. The material of the investigation is news texts selected by means of a continuous sampling from the English website www.bbc.com. The headline of a prognostic news text contains agentive morphosyntactic constructions in the initial position to indicate the participants of a probable event or objects of a future action and predicative pairings in the medial position to identify the potential situation. Three models of text arrangement of the lead and the main body of the prognostic news text enhance the pragmatic impact on the reader. The prophetic model emphasises the degree of potentiality of a future event: high underscored by a predicative structure in the Present Continuous tense, reflecting an activity that is being completed, medium when morphosyntactic constructions indicate the planned or probable situation, low if the predicative structure in the Future Simple tense marks only the future action. The authoritative textual model is embodied by morphosyntactic constructions representing the statements of various experts in the headline, the lead or the main body of a prognostic news text. The causal textual model is used in the analysed news texts to increase the impact on the addressees by providing one or two reasons for the journalist’s predictions, hypotheses, and assumptions.