The Use of Evaluative Vocabulary in German Online Media and Blogs: a Comparative Analysis

Abstract

The article discusses the peculiarities of using evaluative vocabulary in mainstream media and journalistic blogs, which can be viewed as professional and nonprofessional media texts. For the research 10 texts created by German journalists and bloggers were randomly selected. For identifying the evaluative lexemes used in these media texts semantic and contextual analysis was used. For the comparison of the two types of publications calculating an evaluation index of a media text was proposed (the ratio of the evaluative vocabulary to the total number of words in the text). The study found a slight predominance and more variation in evaluation in blogs as compared to media texts created by professional journalists. But the choice of evaluation object, the prevalence of positive or negative meanings, as well as the factors determining the choice of evaluative vocabulary illustrate no differences between texts of professional media and blogs. The use of evaluative vocabulary in both types of media is determined by the topic of the text, its material (facts or opinions), the length of the text (a long text shows lower evaluative index as compared with a short text), the style of the author and some other factors. This underlines the fact that journalistic blogs can be viewed as a special kind of media, citizen media, which extend the facts and opinions published by professional media.

Keywords

• media discourse
• blog
• network media
• citizen journalism
• evaluative vocabulary