Lexical and stylistic derivation in mass media discourse

Abstract

The article deals with the mass media discourse that covers different economic, social, and political aspects of everyday life and such global issues as sustainable development goals. The purpose of the research is to study cases of lexical and stylistic derivation in the mass media discourse. The latter is regarded as a written, monological, informative political discourse indicating society’s language culture. The article identifies the ways of word-building employed in the analyzed discourse and suggests the classification of derived units. Besides, the stylistic properties of the mass media discourse are pointed out. The meanings and functions of the secondary nomination units as units of stylistic derivation (metaphors, metonymies, periphrases, epithets, irony) in the context are described. Renomination by similarity, contiguity and contrast is mentioned. Figures of combination (oxymoron, antithesis, simile) are analyzed in the article. The stylistic potential of phraseology is also considered. The work relies on the recent linguistic research of discourse as a communicative-pragmatic pattern of speech behavior, a complex combination of the process and result, and a coherent text with pragmatic, sociocultural, psychological, and extralinguistic factors. The conclusions are based on English and Ukrainian media, their linguistic and expressive markers.