Journalistic Style in the Modern Language Situation

In the context of our topic the following range of issues are of interest: the beginning of the journalistic style expansion; the way journalistic style must be described, media style and media text in different scientific areas; the reasons for the transition from traditional terms such as journalistic and news-writing style to new terms that have an element of media in their composition; the correlation between the concepts of the journalistic style and media speech, and their characteristics, in the system of coordinates for functional stylistics. The study which includes these aspects allows us to make some generalizations and conclusions. First, representatives of functional stylistics and proponents of new media disciplines see the object and the principles of its research differently. At the same time, functional stylistics is distinguished by the focus not on the media in general, but on the problem of studying their language structure. Second, to paint a picture of the stylistic situation in the Soviet era (the epoch of literary centrism), it is worthwhile to keep the term journalistic style, whereas it is more logical to use the concept of media speech to characterize the post-Soviet period (an era of media centrism). Third, relying on linguistic and extralinguistic parameters, functional stylistics has established that the journalistic style and its successor, media speech (in a narrow interpretation), represent a genre-related and speech continuum whose components – strict and non-strict genres – are not identical in terms of their language constructs.