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The article deals with the development of medialinguistics and other key trends in media language studies for the past two decades. From the year of its formation in 2000 medialinguistics has passed a long way and received the status of a full-fledged academic discipline with a clearly formulated theory, sustainable inner structure, worked out methodology and terminology. The article contains an expanded description of the basic category of medialinguistics – media text, which is defined as a combination of verbal and media signs, actualized in a certain media format and united by common message. The author also analyzes the dynamics of language and format characteristics of media texts under the conditions of digitalization and convergent media. The article gives an overview of the most popular branches of medialinguistic studies, including the analysis of different types of media discourse (news discourse, political media discourse), the study of broadcasting styles and comparative analysis of media speech practices in different countries. The second part of the article represents an overview of key branches of media language studies closely linked with medialinguistics, such as media discourse studies, media stylistics, media rhetoric, internet-linguistics and media textology. In conclusion the author emphasizes that under the conditions of rapid mediatization of all aspects of the contemporary society and dramatic expansion of media speech practices medialinguistics serves a reliable basis for further systematic studies of language functioning in mass media, integrating the existing achievements in the field and developing new vectors of research.

The purpose of this article is to present the basics of a systematic integrated approach to the study of the format and genre diversity of modern media speech, designed within the framework of a separate direction of media linguistic research — media textology. The relevance of the development of media textology as an independent direction is due to the rapid diversification of the format and genre structure of the modern media language under the influence of constant improvement of information and communication technologies and the emergence of new multimedia opportunities for the creation and distribution of media content. The theoretical and methodological apparatus of media textology is built on the basis of previous experience in typological description of speech media practices, taking into account the dynamics of media speech, the spread of new forms of media content representation and the peculiarities of its structuring, including the tendency to hybridization and convergence. The key principle of mediatextology is the selection of media texts proper from the set of texts functioning on the Internet, i.e. those that are created by professional journalists for online media and form the basic media content. Unlike other types of network texts created and distributed by individual users on various network platforms for personal purposes, network media texts are produced and distributed on media platforms that have the status of an official mass media.