Section 1 TEXT COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS What are the participants of the events described? Comment on these people’s positions and their role in the story reported.
What made David Blunkett resign as a home secretary last week?
What was the contents of the email which preceded Mr Blunkett’s resignation?
Did the public row come to an end when David Blunkett left his office?
How do Mr Blunkett’s and Mrs Quinn’s friends comment on the conflict in question?
What gave the story reported a further twist?
What does the complaint upheld by Sir Philip Mawer against Mr Blunkett consist in?
In what connection is the sum £179 mentioned?
What question is to be regarded by the high court on Thursday?
What is the alleged reason for Mrs Quinn’s having been in hospital for 18 days?
Why do the reporters claim that Mr Blunkett’s resignation was supposedly a blow for the prime minister Tony Blair?
What changes did Blair’s cabinet undergo after Mr Blunkett’s departure?
How does Mr Blunkett comment on the situation in the media?
Section 2 ANALYSIS OF GENRE PECULIARITIES OF A NEWSPAPER PUBLICATION 2.1. What do you know about the newspaper the present publication comes from? What type of press does it belong to? How does the type of the printed media influence the language peculiarities of the present newspaper writing?
What kind of information does the newspaper writing convey? Specify what event is in the focus of the publication.
What is the authors’ position towards the information imparted? Do they directly project their own assessment of the event described into the text?
2.2. Characterise the composition of the newspaper writing and say whether there is any marker indispensable of a certain newspaper genre in it.
What is the function of the lead? How does it reflect the ‘five-w-and-h-pattern rule’? Comment on the fixed syntactical structure of the lead.
How does the layout of the written matter help facilitate eliciting the information for an ordinary reader? How many physical paragraphs does the text consist of? What is their syntactical structure?
Comment on the grammatical and lexical peculiarities of the headline as a component of the compositional structure of the newspaper writing. What features of the so-called abbreviated grammar style are observed in it? Comment on the use of the tense form in the headline? What is the syntactical pattern of the headline? Reconstruct the full grammatical version of the headline. Which commonly used headline word is found in it?
2.3. How does the primary function of the newspaper writing in question correlate with its general stylistic tone? What is the stylistic value of the bulk of the vocabulary used in the present newspaper writing?
Pick out special political and economic terms, if any. Are there any terminological units from other fields of knowledge? Account for their use in the present publication.
Find instances of the use of non-term political vocabulary. Is the borderline between political terms and non-terms distinct?
How does clichéd, stereotyped manner of presenting information manifest itself in the present text? Pick out clichéd, stereotyped words, word-combinations and phraseological units and sort them out structurally and semantically. Find their Ukrainian counterparts.
Do you consider the clichéd mode of expression used in the text to be a defect of style?
Is the use of abbreviations a characteristic feature of this publication? Find instances of such and explain what they denote.
Are there any neologisms in the publication in question? What neologisms are generally found in newspaper style?
Are the instances of emotionally coloured lexical units as well as those of words and word-combinations used in their metaphoric, figurative meaning numerous in the present text? If there are any, comment on their stylistic function and the effect achieved?
Is the imagery used in the text genuine or trite in character?
Comment on the syntactical peculiarities of the present newspaper writing. What grammatical parameters and syntactical patterns characteristic of newspaper writing can be found in the present text? Provide examples.
How does the habit of news reporters to include a lot of information about the participants of the events described manifest itself in the present publication?
Can an extensive use of quotations be observed in the newspaper writing in question? Pick them out and comment on the way they are introduced.
Make a conclusion about the genre of the newspaper publication under study.
