ON THE PROBLEM OF THE CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLE OF MEDIA SPEECH ORTHOEPY

The search for a constructive principle of media speech at the orthoepic level is relevant for two reasons: the importance of explaining the reasons for the lack of mu-tually unambiguous relations between the normative guidelines for media workers, proclaimed more than 60 years ago, and the real practice; the need to solve research and applied problems. The evaluation of empirical material through the lens of the norm and the program of the course of orthoepy for journalists entirely depend on the interpretation of the content and specifi cs of the media standard as an ideal (gauge) for the media environment. The standard in its turn depends on the degree of knowledge of the established use in broadcasting. To obtain more or less objective data on the structure of media texts, we used recordings from diff erent cultural and historical eras — Soviet and post-Soviet. We considered the role of the speaker on the air and the genre-format properties of the program. The variants were ranked taking into account the assessments of professionally oriented and academic dictionaries. The research is based on the works of linguists, media theorists, and observations of practitioners. The conducted research has shown that the pronunciation of the media language cannot always be the same, and the normative instructions of professionally oriented dictionaries cannot be applied as universal. The boundaries of the media standard, emerging on the basis of the analysis of real television texts, naturally move apart, refl ecting, on the one hand, the potential capabilities of the pronunciation system, on the other — the complexity of the broadcasting itself. The facts suggest that the constructive principle of media speech as a sphere of literary language is communicative and functional fl exibility, which is expressed in the coexistence and alternation of two main strategies (models) of orthoepic behavior. The announcer and correspondent models, which clearly declared themselves back in the pre-media era, the choice between which is closely related to the role and the TV format, form a single picture, and none of them can be considered primary in relation to the other. It seems that this is an unwritten rule that has been followed by those working in the media.