Elliptical Lexical Units in the English Media Discourse of Early 21st Century

Анотація

The article focuses on the study of new lexemes constructed according to the model of elliptic shortening in the English media discourse of early 21^st century – their structural typology, semantic content and functional implementation of constituting media discourse and its strategies. The material of the researchwas taken form the fragments of English media discourse in on-line versions of newspapers and magazines and lexicographic publications (explanatory dictionaries, and dictionaries of neologisms). The methods of the research include the method of continuous selection of the material, method of reconstruction of word-formation models, methods of definitional and component analysis, methods of qualitative analysis, and linguopragmatic method. The article proves the fact that elliptical lexical units are characterized by two types of ellipsis – the ellipse of the headword and the ellipse of modificator with the predominance of the first type – the process in which the remained adjective of a binary word-combination, known as a substantivized one acquires the paradigm, syntactic functions and the semantic content of the noun. The author comes to the conclusion that in particular it can be explained by the existence of greater number of classifying components that denote not only the referents of reality but also indicate their distinctive properties in the English media discourse as compared with the number of classified components. The role of elliptical lexical innovations in the implementation of attention drawing and appealing to necessities strategies for organizing English media discourse has been examined.