Expressive Interrogative Sentences in the Language of the Media in Montenegro

Abstract

Various expressive realisations of interrogative forms in the language of contemporary journalism are the result of the thematic scope of its texts, commitment to a wide area of socio-cultural trends, but also of the need to attract the addressee’s attention through discourse markers of sensationalism and exclusivity. The stable place of interrogative sentences with the auxiliary verb to be (jeste) and the particle li, in accented and enclitic forms, in such a system in Montenegrin language is reflected precisely through the possibility of stylistic constructions, often uncharacteristic of what we consider to be the typical features of the media language in a strict sense. This paper comes to the conclusion that the expressive form of interrogative sentences in the media language is most often built by lexical markers (such as figures of speech, vocative forms, nouns expressing negative assessment, metaphorical and phraseological expressions, contrastive forms, etc.), and less often by structural ones (such as ellipsis and parcelling). The expression is usually formulated as direct, through the method of labelling, through transfer of assessment from a particular term, through the use of tropes or sentimental intonation. In addition, the expressive function considerably weakens the primary communicative function of the interrogative form, which is to ask a question.

Keywords: Key words: interrogative sentences, expressiveness, media language, auxiliary verb to be, particle li, Montenegrin language, interrogative sentences

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