The polyphony of the French TV news block of a commercial type

Pragmatic intention has a dominating role among the extralinguistic factors that determine the specific features of the language of television discourse. This can be accounted for by the fact that TV discourse is a means of influencing people's minds with the purpose of shaping certain public opinion. A variety of pragmatic objectives and targets set by authors of TV announcements determines the classification of TV genres and further differentiation within the genres in TV discourse. In announcements, the author's pragmatic intention that changes depending on the communicative situation regulates the choice of linguistic means and discursive practices. This is no less true for informational TV genres, and, particularly, for television news discourse. In the French television news discourse, different pragmatic intentions of the authors of announcements (news anchor, reporter, and event witnesses/participants) determine the communicative and pragmatic orientation of thematic news blocks as well as the speakers' choice of linguistic means and practices such as the discursive practice of polyphony (introducing discursive acts into the structure of a news block and several viewpoints into a separate statement). In a thematic commercial-type news block, negative assessment of an event is expressed by "voices" of both the reporter and the event witnesses/participants. The functions and linguistic means of expressing a monosubjective polyphony are to solve the pragmatic objectives of the subjects of a polysubjective polyphony (except for the news anchor who does not use polyphony in his/her speech). The reporter assesses the event on site or critically rethinks the statements of event witnesses/participants by paraphrasing them in the voice-over narration (direct speech is rendered into reported speech by adding evaluative and performative verbs; reported speech is transformed by using modal operators and evaluative adjectives; narrative discourse; etc.). The event witnesses/participants make assessment of a situation they are involved in by using the linguistic means of expressing assessment (evaluative adjectives, exclamations, linguistic means of expressive epistemic, deontic and alethic modal attitude). Leveraging the language component for attaining pragmatic objectives in television news discourse is an interesting avenue of research which allows to provide a more thorough insight into the potential of language as a means of psychological and intellectual impact.

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