This thesis focuses on a complex study of television news RTL aktuell and ZDF heute. The purpose of the research is to reveal essential characteristics and functions of television news, study the structure of news edition and discover instruments of speech manipulation on morphological, syntactic, lexical and prosodic levels; clarify the pragmatic unity of non-verbal and paralinguistic elements of television news with their verbal content.
Research results indicate that television has a significant influence on the perception of information at the psychological level due to simultaneity, the use of audio-visual aids, mimics, gestures, vocabulary and technical capabilities of the montage.
The media text is represented as a unique type of text with such features as a secondary source, pragmatic orientation, relevance, objectivity, and a set of specific communication strategies and tactics.
The research is based on the following linguistic methods: the descriptive method, sampling method, semiotic analysis method, pragmalinguistic analysis, comparative and quantitative method.
It has been found that manipulation on the lexical level is realised by communicative strategies and tactics such as the strategy of forming the necessary opinion or mood of the audience, the strategy of solidarity, the strategy of imposing, the strategy of filtering the information flow. They are achieved with the help of the following tactics: the argument at the beginning of the request, actions at the set of the interests of the addressee, choice without choice, accusation and bullying, use of assumptions, contrasts, comparisons, specific names, borrowings, euphemisms and dysphemisms, refinements, etc. The tools of speech manipulation at the morpho-syntactic level are nominalization, passive voice, elliptical structures and inversions.
The picture in the television news is characterized by production, interactive, semantic and pragmatic aspects, and a factor of attractiveness. In this research factors of pragmatic influence are highlighted by detailed analysis of non-verbal and paraverbal elements of the television news.
