Means of Implicitness in Russian Political Weblogs

Abstract

The study concerns genre characteristics of weblogs as well as the analysis of linguistic means of implicitness in political weblogs. The ongoing communication media development challenges researches with the investigation of its features. From the linguistic standpoint, the genre approach to media studies seems to be the most relevant. We assume that pragmatic genre studies meet the needs of weblogs investigation in the best possible way. This is due to taking into consideration the genre interlocutory nature and the factors of the speaker and the recipient. A weblog is a hybrid genre originating from personal diaries. We argue that weblogs can be considered a hypergenre which combines a weblog entry and commentaries to it. The theory of linguistic means of implicitness is developed by a number of researches. We aim at investigating the means of implicitness which bloggers tend to use. The relevance of implicit meaning studies lies in the lack of consensus on the nature of implicitness. Moreover, we consider it relevant to develop types of linguistic tools that implement implicit meanings. One more pressing research task is the description of linguistic means of implicitness typical of the Internet genres, specifically of the weblog genre. The study was conducted using qualitative general scientific and linguistic methods. The results show that Russian-speaking bloggers tend to use connotative words, idioms and allusions to implicate a negative assessment of political figures and events.

Keywords

• internet genre
• weblog
• computer-mediated communication
• politics
• implicitness
• connotative vocabulary
• phraseology
• allusion