Minitexts in American media-discourse (based on the titles of YouTube videos featuring Donald Trump)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the linguo-pragmatic analysis of the titles in the Internet media discourse. The research is based on 300 English titles of YouTube programmes devoted to Donald Trump and his activities that were uploaded within the period of 2016 to 2020. The aforesaid titles are considered as minitexts possessing the whole set of basic characteristics typical of the traditional language units of textual format. The authors take the premise that a title reflects all the functional and pragmatic features of the material it refers to, however, due to its small volume it proves to be more beneficial for eliciting the ways how linguistic and discourse means interact in the process of text production. The research is carried out with the help of the following methods: discourse analysis, interpretative analysis, descriptive method including functional and stylistic identification techniques. The contextual analysis of the selected titles contributes to determination of the focal points of the public interest concerning the figure of the American President on the one hand and it also helps to discover the trends within the public attitude evaluative vectors on the other hand, which prove to be outspokenly critical. Further on the linguistic peculiarities of the mini-format titles are studied in view of their lexical, syntactical and expressive specific features. All the data obtained is systematized in terms of a multi-level framework of language means expressing the public attitude to the figure of the American President. What is more, the ways of enhancing the pragmatic effect of the titles are elicited with regard to the extralinguistic factors such as the particular target audience, the specific communication setting and the channel of transmitting information.