Жанрова ієрархія англійськомовного медіадискурсу

The aim of the paper is to describe genres of English media discourse with the application of Vantage Theory, which investigates category formation with respect to human orientation in space and time. The applied theory constructs categories on the basis of inherently stable and mobile coordinates at two levels: dominant, intensifying focal parameters of the category focus, and recessive, accentuating differences from the focus. It is found that the focus, i.e., the prototype of the media discourse category, is a news text representing recent or recurrent events with the focal parameters of factual information, newsworthiness, persuasion, brevity of form, and clear structure. The dominant vantage of media discourse is represented by an analytical text, intensifying key attributes of a news text by providing interpretation of facts, expert assessment of events, enumerating causes and consequences of the described issue, and stimulating the readers to find a solution to the problem. The category of media discourse has two recessive vantages. The literary recessive vantage decategorises informativity and highlights imagined or emotional descriptions of events in prognostic news texts, which inform the target audience about possible development of the situation in the future, feature articles, providing emotional human-interest stories, and fake news, structured like a prototypical news text, but offering fabricated or distorted facts. The second recessive vantage reflects oral decategorisation by bringing a news text closer to oral face-to-face interaction. This vantage encompasses blogs, which are a digital personal diary aimed at asynchronous responses from numerous followers, interviews, imitating real-life dialogue, and public speeches with a rhetor addressing mass audience via modern technologies.