Reactive Pragmatic Models in Non-Professional Internet Discourse

Abstract

The response pragmatics in political Internet discourse is one of the most interesting and understudied aspects of modern virtual communication. This research featured a model of non-professional Internet discourse in the genre of political Internet commentary and its pragmatics. The resulting models correlated with the general model, which was based on the communicative intentions of the authors of political Internet comments. The empirical material involved feedback lines from readers of the RIA Novosti news agency. Determining the textual entity by its sender’s macrointension, the authors established the genre of Internet commentary as reactive. The pragmatic options for response patterns were based on the addressee’s communicative role and the reactive macrointension implemented in non-professional Internet discourse. The paper describes two reactive models of non-professional discourse: 1) reaction to a political event; 2) reaction to a pragmatic context. The method of linguistic and pragmatic discourse analysis revealed that the reactive models contained the following types of reaction: positive, negative, and twofold. However, the Internet comments also included an interpretative component. The reactive intention of the subjects of non-professional Internet discourse was combined with their intention to introduce a fragment of personal experience.

Keywords

• non-professional discourse
• internet comments
• political media text
• model
• intention
• reaction
• interpretation
• linguopragmatic analysis