This paper reveals how journalists’ age influences the linguistic representation of causal relations in English news magazine articles. Treating cause in a broad sense covering adverbials and clauses of reason, concession, purpose and result, the study finds that causal relations are scarce in the texts of young reporters. Unlike them, middle-aged authors’ articles demonstrate a 17-per-cent-higher frequency of adverbials and clauses of reason, and older journalists’ texts show a 12-per-cent rise in concessive clauses with the temporal concessive, comparative concessive, alternative concessive, conditional concessive and generalizing concessive relations. To account for these findings, I apply Talmy’s (1985) force dynamics theory viewing cause as an interaction of entities concerning force and energy where one causes another. Given this theory, middle-aged journalists verbalise causal relations grounded in what I call energy transfer model with one moving entity causing another to move, and energy loss model where inactivity of one entity is due to blocking of the other entity. In older authors’ articles, causal relations are represented by concessive clauses introduced by a range of conjunctions specifying concessive meaning: temporal concessive, comparative concessive, alternative concessive, conditional concessive and generalizing concessive.
The article studies the linguistic means of English Internet news headlines performing advertising function. Viewing headline as a riveting shortcut to the contents of an article, advertising function lies in attracting attention to the full-text. It is found that cognitively news headlines are based on the same perceptual abilities as advertising slogans captured by image-schemas-recurring dynamic patterns of human perceptual interaction and motor programs structuring our experiences. The analysis of 30 BBC news stories and 20 advertising slogans has demonstrated that most frequently news headlines and slogans rely on force image schemas. COUNTERFORCE representing the meeting of two equally important forces that collide relies on different verbs and syntactic structures in news headlines and advertising slogans. In headlines it is denoted by the verbs to attack, to hit, to warn, and slogans draw on the verb to hit. COMPULSION denoting the source which makes the target do something relies on the verbs to force, to make, to provoke in news headlines and to make and to obey in slogans. BLOCKAGE representing a force vector encountering a barrier and then taking any number of possible directions is denoted in headlines by the verbs to reject, to jail, to sue, to trap, to poison and in slogans by the verbs to cool in the meaning to trap and to jail. RESTRAINT REMOVAL is represented by the verbs to answer, to find, to free in headlines and the verbs to let and to answer in slogans. ENABLEMENT representing a force which helps the target to exist is denoted by the verbs to create, to give, to help, to make, to vote in headlines and to give, to help in slogans. DISABLEMENT represents the force which destroys the target of the action in headlines by the verbs to kill, to lose, to reject, and slogans draw on the verbs to kill, to melt.
The article explores lexical, lexical-grammatical and grammatical means of verbalizing the idea of exclusiveness in BBC Travel texts. Defining exclusiveness as the state of being available to a limited group of people due to their privileged status or because of high cost of a product, the analysis of 60 BBC Travel articles suggests that the choice of linguistic means is delimited by the destination the authors describe: Europe, America, Asia, Africa or Middle East. The results of the analysis demonstrate that describing Europe the authors focus on its history, art and attractions, America is marked by its feel-good factors, Africa and Middle East are presented as exclusive due to their nature and authentic culture, and destinations in Asia are famous for their pristine nature and urbanization. The paper proves that the use of linguistic means is constrained by the topic and genre of discourse.
The research focuses on the variations in the degrees of equivalence manifested in English and Ukrainian constructions referring to blind people. In this study, patterns consisting of two or more words referring to people with decreasing ability to see, all forms sight impairment are termed blindness-constructions. The results show that in translating from English into Ukrainian blindness-constructions reveal varying degrees of equivalence: from exact correspondence in case of immediate constructions to some sort of constructional mismatch in extended patterns. High degree of equivalence with the immediate blindness-constructions is explained by their fixed form: they include combinations of words with the nouns impairment, sight / vision and the adjective blind describing stable attributes without reference to any specific situation. The modified English blindness-constructions rarely have equivalents readily available in Ukrainian, since their modifying elements broaden or narrow the meaning of immediate constructions restricting their usage to particular contexts in source and target languages. The extended blindness-constructions exhibit a mismatch across the languages. These constructions are made up of two immediate or modified ones and represent the generalized models of situations where translators, forced by the non-existence of identical patterns, have to resort to various strategies.
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