Linguistische Treffen in Wrocław (Jun 2021)
Deutschland will kein starkes Polen / Deutschland will Polen abstrafen – Persuasion in einem Medientext am Beispiel der Schlagzeilen in den polnischen Hauptnachrichten „Wiadomości“
Abstract
The PiS party, which has been in power in Poland since October 2015, has completely subjugated the public television TVP. Every day, it runs the state propaganda, whose symbol has become the headlines in the main Polish news called Wiadomości (The News). Germany, along with the opposition and the EU, is most often attacked in them. Headlines such as “Germany does not want a strong Poland”, “Brussels, Berlin and the opposition are against Poland”, “The opposition and Germany want to punish Poland” are not uncommon and are jokingly called paski grozy (horror headlines) by internet users. The aim of this article is to examine selected headlines in relation to the linguistic persuasion strategies that serve to reinforce the negative image of Germany in Poland on the one hand, and lead to the heating up of anti-German emotions on the other. A headline is understood here as a short sentence or sentence ellipsis that has a visual character and fulfils an introductory function for the right journalistic material. The character and communication pragmatic role of such headlines coincide with those known from the press. The corpus comprises 34 headlines coming from the period of 2016–2019 and was divided into four domains with regard to the topics touched upon in them: Politics, History, Society or Economy. In the analysis, elements related to the linguistic expression of reality assessment were taken into account. Four groups of these elements were distinguished: words and expressions independent of the author, interrogative sentences, evaluative elements at the system and sentence level, and evaluative elements referring to the external linguistic context. The analysis shows that with the help of the evaluation elements at the system and sentence level, connotations and implicatures, Germany and Germans were presented in a clearly unfavourable light. In eight headlines, negative information was implied, five headlines contained negative connotations, and in six headlines other negatively charged evaluation elements were added to neutral terms. Finally, in seven headlines, lexemes occur that have exclusively a hostility-increasing role. Only 3 headlines were classified as neutral.
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