Contextual Equivalents of Proper Names in the Media

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Kazan Federal University

2 Ural State Pedagogical University

Abstract

The article discusses the ways of media personality nominations. It has been established that the typical linguistic forms of personality representation in newspaper texts are the proper name (anthroponym) and its contextual equivalents, which are secondary nominations.  The modifications of proper name, lexeme identifiers and periphrases can act as the contextual equivalents of official anthroponyms. The latter can be either evaluative or evaluative neutral. Evaluation periphrases create a publication character image, form the public perception of a media personality necessary for a message sender. Periphrases neutral in terms of evaluation, help the reader to identify the media personality in terms of professional activity, social status, age, the place of residence and other parameters. A special group of contextual equivalents of the name are the periphrases that have become case-law and / or are correlated with the case-law situation, which is actively discussed in the media. The systematization of periphrases by the degree of correlation with a particular referent made it possible to distinguish the following types of them: a) the periphrases correlated with the referent in context exclusively; b) the periphrases assigned to the referent in a limited time period; c) the periphrases assigned to the referent regardless of time and context; d) stable periphrases of a metaphorical nature that do not have a clear assignment to the referent and appear in the text as evaluative elements. The study allows us to argue that contextual equivalents are the means of text coherence provision, avoiding repetition, additional information provision about the media personality, the creation of certain image of him and a powerful means of public opinion development.

Keywords

Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics
Volume 10, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Applied Linguistics Issues (ALI 2019) July 19-20, 2019, Saint Petersburg, Russia
This special issue of the journal includes papers published in the spirit of academic support of the conference and so they did not go through the review process defined by the journal.
July 2019
Pages 911-918

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