Mediadiscourse: The concept, approaches to studying, research perspectives

This paper offers a media discourse conceptualization through a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches. The emphasis is placed on examining media discourse through the prism of the communicative and interdisciplinary approaches. The aim of the article is to reveal the concept of media discourse in the aspect of communication theory principles, to review traditional approaches to its study and to identify the prospects for further research, offering new angles of the media text interdisciplinary analysis. The article is theoretical in nature, the main research methods are general scientific ones: a theoretical analysis, an abstract presentation with generalization and heuristic elements, the analysis and synthesis of theoretical data, the comparison, contrast and descriptive methods. The object of study is media discourse, the subject is its characteristic properties, the approaches to its definition in different fields of knowledge, primarily in philology. As a result, we identify promising directions of media discourse research and its characteristic features – dialogicality, “new” colloquiality, multimodality, discursiveness and global contextuality. The scientific novelty of the research is its orientation towards the communicative and interdisciplinary approach and the prospect of studying this object. Being a complex new phenomenon that is still developing, media discourse cannot be studied by the tools of one isolated field of knowledge (for example, linguistics), because it is a voluminous and highly complex structure that includes, in addition to language, situation, event, attitude to it, political narratives, social stereotypes and historical references. The practical significance of the study is the presentation of new approaches to the study of media discourse. The study of media discourse offers broad prospects for use in media education, political communication and communication-oriented research.