Weather forecast as a media genre in the 21st century

Makarkina V. Weather forecast as a media genre in the 21st century : bachelor’s thesis : 035 Philology / supervised by T. Biletska. Kyiv, 2025. 69 p.

This bachelor’s paper examines the weather forecast as a media genre in the 21st century, focusing on its linguistic, stylistic, and communicative features in Australian, British, and American English. The study analyses how weather forecasts function not only as tools for delivering meteorological information but also as culturally and linguistically structured media texts that reflect broader patterns of discourse and audience engagement.
The relevance of this research lies in the increasing hybridisation of media genres and the growing role of language in shaping public communication. As weather forecasts evolve into multimodal communication formats, their linguistic structure becomes more dynamic and responsive to visual, textual, and interactive components aimed at audience attention and comprehension.
The aim of the study is to explore the lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical elements of modern weather forecasts and to trace their transformation from traditional informative bulletins to expressive and engaging communicative forms. Special attention is given to regional variation across English-speaking cultures and to stylistic devices such as metaphor, personification, and repetition, which enhance the emotional impact and accessibility of the message.
The findings confirm that the weather forecast is a flexible and communicatively rich discourse that adapts to technological change, audience expectations, and cultural norms. It illustrates the hybrid nature of modern media genres and exemplifies how language mediates the relationship between information and its recipients in public communication.