Original scientific paper
Linguistic Means of New Source References: The Case of the Slovenian Press Agency
Melita Poler
; Kovačić
Vesna Laban
Abstract
National and foreign news agencies represent the basic news sources for journalists. The quality journalistic discourse includes simplicity, punctuality, reliability, and objectivity of agency information.
The article examines the way Slovene news agency (STA) quotes or abbreviates opinions and attitudes of their sources. Using the linguistic-stylistic method, the authors’ analyze linguistic means of referring in STA reports. Their research discovers the use of a wide range of verbs which symbolize speech, thinking and understanding, which is a consequence of the journalistic desire to avoid monotony in their texts. Surprisingly, the use of quotation is rare, and the boundaries between author’s text and quotation are unclear: it is often not clear if the information is the attitude of the source of a hidden journalistic commentary. Journalists abbreviate their sources, use the reports of other news agencies, which consequents in double or triple referring. The use of syntactic which expresses unreliability of an event or a situation is often redundant. This can be a result of journalistic ignorance of the consequences of using the structure, and trying to hard to mediate the information as objective as possible. In most of the cases, the user is not an “ordinary reader”, but a journalist or editor who wants the latest information in the purest form. That is why news agencies usually have clear and schematized form of news writing without stylistic originality.
Keywords
agency information; Slowene news agency; linguistic means of referring; shematized form of news writing
Hrčak ID:
22961
URI
Publication date:
20.6.2006.
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