The interaction of closely related languages in modern journalism: Opportunities for increasing expressiveness

Abstract

Based on the material of Russian-language journalistic works of one popular Ukrainian media source (Weekly 2000), the article establishes and interprets the functional load of such a technique as the introduction into media texts of elements of a language that is closely related to the language of publication: in this case, a different type and character of Ukrainianisms (words, expressions, fragments of someone else’s speech, etc.). The conducted observations indicate that in modern Russian-language journalism of Ukraine, elements of a closely related Ukrainian language included in the text in the overwhelming majority of cases are endowed with the functions of a negative assessment of the depicted (which is almost always presented in a satirical or satirical-ironic key), while contributing to a more expressive transmission of the author’s attitude to subject of the picture. Such functions of Ukrainianisms in Ukraine’s journalism, created under the conditions of closely related bilingualism, are conditioned by extralinguistic factors — first of all, by the undemocratic language policy pursued by the state authorities for several decades. It is as a result of these actions that most of the considered text elements have formed the connotative content of a negative property, which, when introduced into a media text, is updated and / or expanded as a result of placing it in a context. In such a situation, well-known Ukrainianisms also acquire negative connotations, which have always been perceived as markers of the national-cultural Ukrainian flavor (vyshyvanka, rushnik, glechik, etc.), and this perception was extremely rarely negative. The analysis carried out provides grounds to assert that the appeal of journalists to the introduction of elements of contacting languages into media texts remains one of the most significant methods of increasing the expressiveness of a text, the specific load of which is determined both by extralinguistic factors and by the peculiarities of the author’s individual manner.