LINGUISTIC PECULIARITIES OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE MEDIA CONTENT ABOUT THE STATE OF THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to identify linguistic peculiarities of emotiveness on lexical and syntactic levels in the media news using the content of the website “Sprudge” covering the functioning of businesses which produce and process coffee, and also enterprises of the hospitality industry selling coffee products. Analysis of available publications elucidating the issue of emotive vocabulary and syntax shows that they mostly focus on fictional works. A lack of studies considering emotiveness in the media news about the state of the hospitality industry accounts for the topicality of the research subject. The methods of comprehensive and component analyses were used. The emotive vocabulary used in the posts on the website testify to a quite high level of standardization which manifests itself in multiple repetitions of a limited number of lexical units denoting a certain emotional state. In terms of representativeness by the parts of speech, the largest group of emotive vocabulary comprises adjectives, there are slightly fewer emotive nouns. The group of positive emotive vocabulary is considerably larger in number by all parts of speech, than the group of negative emotive units which are mainly used in the news related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis of the content of the American website “Sprudge” made it possible to distinguish syntactic units with the markers of emotiveness and group them by the types of structures: interrogative sentences in general and rhetorical questions in particular (incomplete sentences, interrogative-affirmative models, gradation), exclamatory sentences, repetitions, parcellations and introductory words. The identified emotive structures mostly correlate with positive emotions of joy, love and satisfactions, however, one can sometimes find syntactic means of expressing agitation, confusion, sadness and even anger. Interrogative questions dominate by the frequency of functioning among the syntactic units. The practical value of the research consists in the possibility to use its findings for writing graduates’ and postgraduates’ qualifying papers.