In the framework of anthropocentric and interdisciplinary approaches, the thesis provides a comprehensive study of linguopragmatic features of satire in British media discourse on the material of Private Eye magazine. According to the scientific paradigm, satire is defined as a means to express the comic effect used for sharp criticism of the satirical target.
Satire is shown to successfully fulfill its critical potential in media discourse in which all the current events, updates and negative tendencies in our society are promptly exposed. Due to its inherent capacity to incorporate information and entertainment, satire successfully performs the three major functions of media: to inform, to entertain and to persuade.
From the discursive approach to analysing satire, it was determined that prime and dialectic elements of satire are the projections of real and mythical subdomains, which overlap to form a satirical domain. The prime and dialectic elements of satirical discourse are created with the help of the linguistic means referred to as metaphoric and metonymic satirical methods.
The metaphoric satirical method, which is used to form the prime element of satire, involves a particular set of strategies of satirical discourse that are interdiscursive in their overall bearing. Thus, the metaphoric satirical method incorporates techniques that embody some degree of cross-domain conceptual mapping. It is established that the metaphoric satirical method is fulfilled with the help of such intertextual units: reminiscence, transformed quotations, precedent-related phenomena, personification, objectification and stylistic adjustment. These units bind together real and mythical elements and create a satirical text with traceable echoes of previous texts, events or other phenomena, the interpretations of which result in a stronger cognitive effect. The metonymic satirical method involves stylistic techniques that sustain a collision in-text that stays within the same conceptual domain, and is fulfilled through saturation, attenuation and negation. The metonymic satirical technique of saturation is realized through such linguistic means as repetition, colloquialism, stylistic inconsistency, word play, jargonism, slangism and lexico-grammatical mistakes. The metonymic satirical technique of attenuation is realized through the following linguistic means: paraphrase or undercoding, euphemisms and lexico-graphic clichés. The metonymic satirical technique of negation is realized through the means of explicit negation (not, never, no, nobody, nothing, nowhere, neither…nor) and the means of implicit negation (words with prefixes un-, in, im-, dis-; and verbs of implicit negation and conditionals). The metonymic satirical technique of saturation applied to form the dialectic element of satire is observed to be the most frequently used one (73,36 %). Thus, it is proven that the technique which saturates or exaggerates certain features of a subject, making them more obvious and subsequently less possible to be ignored by the reader, prevails over both the technique of negation (18,94 %) and the technique of attenuation (7,7 %).
