The popular science series as a hypergenre of media discourse

The article is about the hypergenre "popular science series" functioning in the polydiscursive space of the media discourse. It is about the features of the functioning of the nuclear genres "interview" and "reportage" in the series. The material of the study is based on the texts of the BBC TV series in the volume of 73 pages of printed text or 734 minutes. The communicative purpose of the hypergenre "popular science series" is the formation of a popular scientific picture of the world for mass audience. Each of the genres tends to take its position in the space of the hypergenre, realizing both its aim and the aim of the popular science series. Thus, the interview realizes the aim of obtaining information and the aim of the hypergenre, of providing information from an authoritative source. The aim of the reportage and the hypergenre intersect: they provide reliable information "here and now" (reportage) and influence the recipient by attracting their attention and motivating them to mental activity (reportage, popular science series). The story is an essential genre in the series: it forms the historical past which allows the sender to attract the subject and give an idea of the situation in the present premises. On the basis of the material in the article, a hypothesis is put forward: information on the series is specifically allocated to different genres, on the one hand, to keep the attention and to entertain, on the other, to reveal the deeper knowledge of different aspects. Thus, information for the recipient is distributed by genres: the interview is new information for science, a recent discovery; the reportage is something that has long been discovered, and needs updating for a mass audience in the format "from the field". Besides the description of the aim of the hypergenre, the article focuses on the description of the sender-recipient position. The sender of a series is a group of media product creators. Explicitly, it is presented as a TV presenter in the role of a scientist, a television journalist. The sender broadcasts popular science knowledge by playing the role of a "professional" in relation to a mass audience. The recipient of the genre is the mass audience, the viewer that can be "professional" or "unprofessional", have different social status, gender and age characteristics. The recipient may be a permanent spectator who watches the series episode by episode and random who joined the discussion of topics recently. That is why it is important for the sender to build a relationship with the recepient throughout the series, and in separate episodes. Thus, the article examines the implementation of the aims of complex speech genres, their functioning and interaction as parts of a hypergenre.

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