On some tendencies in the grammar of news text on electronic news portals: The dissolution of the subject

Abstract

The article deals with some general grammatical peculiarities of news texts on the Yandex portal. According to the author, they reflect the present-day tendencies in the identified sphere. Following Van Dijk, the author examines text as a macrostructure with certain sequences of sentences. The present-day news text has a heterogeneous structure formed through the combination of the voices of the author and those who convey “the words of others” and act as immediate participants of the defined situation. The change in punctuation used to convey the speech of others in Russian texts highlighted by the author may have happened under the influence of English punctuation. This change creates a new pattern for the conveyance of the speech of others, according to which the boundaries between “one’s own” and “somebody else’s” words blur, with the role of the author becoming weaker. The voice of others represented in different ways, i. e., through the use of direct and indirect speech with various modifications and the author’s interpretation of the Other’s words, becomes dominant in the news text. Due to the repetition of the same thought through the use of different means the news text quits being informatively impeccable. On the basis of the analysis of the syntactic structure of the news texts headlines, the author points out the frequency of indefinite-personal sentences in them. Both the fact that the author’s voice is diluted by “somebody else’s” speech and the elimination of the subject in the most frequently used syntactic form of the headline, that is, the indefinite-personal sentence, allows us to think that in the contemporary world the role of the subject is being weakened, its “dissolution” in the actions of others or in “other” discursive practices argued by the postmodern philosophy is reflected on the grammatical level of text.