Celebrity as Hero of Mass Media Narration (by Material of Articles about Kim Kardashian)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the interpretation of the communicative-cognitive continuum is a news narration, where the actors are celebrities. The relevance of the study is determined by increased interest in the modern linguistics to the interaction between linguistic personalities belonging to different socio-cultural communities, and also to the pragmatic characteristics of their media presentation, in particular, in the narrative about celebrities. The author considers communicative and pragmatic peculiarities of narratives about Kim Kardashian on the material of articles from a quality newspaper “Frankfurter Rundschau” and tabloid “Express.” Analysis of the empirical material showed that the dominant markers of the narratives under consideration are: the lack of direct contact between narrator and celebrity; the frequency of evidence constructions for marking source of information to describe the hero; imagery and expressiveness in the portrait descriptions of celebrity; contrastive image of celebrity’s wealth and poverty as sensational detail; using a reduced vocabulary for the journalistic evaluation of the behaviour of a celebrity in a tabloid newspaper; portrait of a celebrity as a character in narrative or case reference when characterizing other denotative content; the alternation of the sensations in celebrity life and periods of comparative calm scene of action, that is, “weak positions” in the narrative structure.