Verbal culture of Ukrainian mass media: purpose and means (review article)

The review article critically analyzes the monograph on medialinguistics. It emphasizes the relevance of the elaborated topic, representativeness of the illustrative research base, and importance of the obtained results for understanding the nature of language changes’ determinism. Content dominants of the scientific work are outlined in accordance with its structure. The reviewer notes that with the beginning of this century the phenomenon of functional-style dynamics has clearly affected the development of the Ukrainian language. The lexical-semantic subsystem naturally turned out to be the most open to changes. Mass media communication became its organic medium as its imminent purpose is instant response to the demands of society, in particular, its linguistic and cultural needs. The author of the peer-reviewed book comprehends the factors, trends and facts that influenced the lexicon of modern Ukrainian periodicals and eventually formed it. The word consistently reflects intra-lingual processes, for example, inter-style interaction, and extra-lingual situation – political and legal, socio-economic, cultural and educational – which defines them. In the language of Ukrainian media, bookish elements are clearly updated – as a means of primary/secondary nomination, in particular, terms of various knowledge areas as well as acronyms. Media style actively assimilates the attributes of a colloquial style, and this affects the expression level of newspaper discourse. The dialogue effect is often achieved through the use of substandard units, such as slang. Confessional vocabulary, which mostly implements primary semantics, has a special place in periodicals’ thesaurus. The widespread use of various style means in the researched texts demonstrates the diffuseness of contemporary Ukrainian mass media lexicon.