USE OF EPITHETS IN ENGLISH-SPEAKING PERIODICAL PRESS

Abstract

The study of the specifics of publicistic style and its linguistic and stylistic peculiarities is relevant and it is caused by the linguists’ increased attention to mass media texts as a means of influence on the audience and the importance of a more complete examination of the linguistic text features. The lexical composition of newspaper texts is extremely diverse as the newspaper is a means of reflecting modern language development, and the periodical press uses various expressive means. The following English-speaking newspapers The Daily Mail, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, Daily News, BBC News, Los Angeles Times, Esquire and The Washington Post , provide analysis of expressive means used with a view to distin-guishing epithets and examining their distribution and use in the periodical press. The article researches and illustrates different types of epithets distinguished on a variety of principles: in terms of their semantics, structure, nature of nomination and type of connotative meaning. From the semantic perspective there exist common language and individual epithets. In terms of nature of nomination epithets are classified into metaphoric and metonymic. The periodical press verifies use of all the structural epithet types, viz. simple, compound and epithet chains. The expression of the author’s viewpoint can be communicated with the help of epithets with meliorative, pejorative or neutral connotative meaning.