The role of referential mechanisms of subject naming in the manifestation of intertextuality in news articles (on the material of the Belarusian and English languages)

The study of the relationship between the universal mechanisms of subject reference with its linguocultural naming specifics and the omnipresent category of intertextuality in media discourse seems to be relevant due to the ontological nature of this relationship and insufficient study of this phenomenon. The paper aims to determine referential and pragmatic characteristics of the subject components of the authorization and deauthorization structures in the intertexts of news articles. Research methods employed comprise the inductive method, contextual and semantic-and-pragmatic analysis. The material under study is news articles in the Belarusian (Zvyazda, a local newspaper) and English (The Times) languages. An analysis of the ways how the intertexts in the news articles are incorporated revealed a correlation between the type of the referential mechanism used in relation to the subject of (de)authorization structures and the (im)possibility of relating intertextual fragments of the recipient text with the donor text. It has been established that in news articles intertexts are used for the purpose of argumentation and/or preservation of the original evaluative judgement in the case of fragment quoting. Logical argumentation mainly relies on texts of institutional affiliation with the activation of the communicative tool ‘authoritative reference’, while psychological argumentation is formed, as a rule, on the basis of texts of non-institutional affiliation representing opinions of generalized or indefinite subjects. The study revealed that in most cases it is impossible to establish the correlation of intertexts in the function of psychological argumentation with donor texts due to the non-referential subject marking the intertext, while intertexts in the function of logical argumentation, as a rule, demonstrate correlation with donor texts due to predominantly referential subjects.