Argumentative speech in mass media interactive communication

Abstract

The article deals with features of argumentative speech in television political talk shows, which have become one of the most important means of forming public opinion, as well as in social media, the role of which in the system of mass communication continues to increase. We conducted a review of studies on reasoning, one of the main functional and semantic types of speech. According to the broad interpretation, the reasoning is an argumentative speech that is designed to convince the addressee of something. This implies that the analysis of speech structures considers not only logical and grammatical aspects but also functional and communicative aspects. After reviewing the main issues on the verbal interaction study particularly in linguostylistics and neo-rhetoric (theory of argumentation), we highlighted the fundamental nature of the stylistic-speech system. The latter is defined as interconnections of different language units which perform a common communicative task. This system allows describing the variability of speech depending on the changing communicative purposes and other parameters of the communicative situation. Each issue of the television political talk show is considered as a supertext that is specific reasoning. A moderator formulates its main idea (thesis) in a brief introductory speech and repeats it as a result of the discussion (conclusion) in the final part of the broadcast, while the speeches of the guests — journalists and political scientists — represent a bilateral argument (for and against). We studied speech units that are regularly encountered in these television programs, such as forms of dialogicity, methods of statement substantiation, as well as actual language means used by the speaker in the analysis of the political situation. We also described a complex of verbal and non-verbal means of accentuation of meaningful text components. While the participants of television political programs necessarily reason their point of view, Internet users often demonstrate their attitude to the events under discussion via emotional statements. In our opinion, the reduction of argumentative practices in network communication is due to the fact that, unlike political talk shows, which form the main trends in public opinion, social media express mainly situational group mood based on the emotional attitude to events.