Lietišķais stils plašsaziņas līdzekļos
Official Business Style in the Mass Media

Summary/Abstract: There are specific functions for mass media in each society. Magazines and newspapers perform informative, educational, as well as entertaining functions. Every article in newspapers or magazines is addressed to a certain target group. Therefore, the language tools can differ in each article. More or less codified and standardized language tools can be used based on the function of the media.The purpose of this article is to investigate whether official business language style is used in the mass media in Latvian and which features are still detected in magazines and newspapers. The mass media is appropriate source for research because it shows all changes occurring in a language. A considerable part of articles in daily newspapers is provided with an aim to inform the society. Appropriate language style for this purpose is an emotionally neutral business style.Texts used for analysis represent two different types: advertisements published in the daily newspaper “Diena” during the year 2007 and analytical articles published in the magazine“Lietišķā Diena” and the newspaper “Dienas Bizness” during the year 2008.Excerpted examples allow to establish that the official business language style still features in the mass media. One of the most important features is neutrality, which is achieved by choosing passive voice verb forms. Standardization is observable – the use of established,well known phrases. The analysed language material shows that official business style is also rich in foreign words and terms. But conciseness, even though mentioned in theory as a typical feature of business language, very rarely appears in the mass media. It is more common now to talk about redundancy of words in newspapers and magazines. The author of this article considers that this tendency is related to democratization of language, when it becomes difficult to draw boundaries among the functional styles of the Latvian language.This investigation detects changes in the Latvian language – some time ago, the boundaries among functional styles were very clear, but nowadays elements of different language styles are more mixed.

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