Linguistic and stylistic features of the essay as a journalistic genre

Abstract

The article concretizes the concept of essay as a journalistic genre, outlines its specific genre features. Research on the stylistics of essay texts by various authors is analyzed. It is stated that essays are considered mainly from the point of view of the theory of journalism and literary criticism, the general linguistic and stylistic features of the essay text have not been outlined yet. The aim of the article was to determine the structural-compositional, syntactic, lexical-semantic, phraseological linguistic means used in the essay. The essay is interpreted as a small artistic and journalistic prose work on abstract-philosophical, aesthetic, literary-ethical theme, which has an arbitrary composition and reproduces the personal thoughts and impressions of the author on a particular occasion or issue, and is not an exhaustive and defining interpretation of the theme. The features of the essay, such as the logic of the opinion, are identified; attention to the artistic form of the text; subjective judgment of the author about an object; the possibility of involving the general cultural context of the background knowledge of the addressee; ease of speech; imagery, aphorisms, metaphors, etc. The structural and compositional means of the essay are outlined, which include the argumentative nature of the unfolding of the text, which is manifested in the logical acts of comparison, opposition, analogy, proof; in the judgments and reflections of the addressee of the speech; key sentences that determine the theme and content of the work; means of communication, including repetitions, parallel constructions, antitheses. The syntactic means of essay texts include inversion of words, rhetorical questions, sentences with different types of syntactic connection, exclamatory statements; means of expressive syntax are represented by ellipse, repetitions, gradation, inversion, parallel constructions. It is noted that the most expressive lexical and semantic feature of this genre is the wide expressive possibilities of the artistic word, in particular imagery. Therefore, at the lexical-semantic and phraseological levels, the characteristic means of the essay are the constant use of tropes: metaphors, personifications, comparisons, epithets, symbolic and allegorical images. A striking feature of the essay text is intertextuality, which finds expression in aphorisms, sentences, maxims, quotations. Keywords: essay, essays, essay genre, essay text, linguistic and stylistic features of the essay.