Formal characteristics of English PR- and media-articles

The article describes a contrastive analysis of formal characteristics, typical of PR- and media-materials in the English language, obtained with the aid of a specially designed program ‘TextExplorer 1.0’ integrated in the Qt Creator development environment. The aim of the research is to reveal genre specifics of PR- and media-texts at the formal level. The research material included 600 PR- and media-articles selected by continuous sampling. The scientific novelty lies in establishing certain formal typological features of PR- and media-texts. As a result of digital text analysis, it was found that, according to the general number of characters, PR-articles exceed the volume of media-articles by 20%. The sentences in PR-articles are 40% longer in characters. The words in PR-articles are longer than those in the media-articles. The paragraphs in media-articles normally coincide with the sentences in length; whereas in PR-articles the paragraphs consist of two sentences. The titles in PR-articles are 50% longer than those in media-articles. The leads in PR-articles are twice as long as those in media-articles. The use of punctuation marks is different in PR- and media-materials. The obtained results testify to formal differences between PR- and media-texts, which need further research at the semantic and syntactic level.