COVID-19 reflected in emotional journalistic texts

Abstract

The article presents the results of research based on the analysis of media texts reflecting the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of people globally. As this impact is mainly negative, all these media texts (printed and digital) belong to the journalism of an emotional nature. The authors present the classification of journalistic genres, make the important subdivision into hard news and soft news, analyse the most popular emotions theories and approaches to their study. The pandemic reflected in media may be considered as hard news and is closely connected with news value, i.e. the impact of the publication on a wide audience. News values may function in the text as signals of addressee orientation. The definite impact may be evoked by emotively charged words in the media text; such words can be regarded from the perspective of emotive semantics. This approach leads us to media linguistics, a relatively new branch of linguistics which is based on the multilevel analysis of media text, namely text structure (each journalistic message has its own specific composition), vocabulary (texts belonging to journalism of analytical or emotional types have different vocabulary), and categories (structural and semantic text categories depend on journalistic genre). Media texts belonging to emotional journalism abound in different stylistic devices; in our essay semasiological and syntactic devices are prevalent.