Linguistic Means of Implementation of Communicative Strategies in the Social Media Discourse (Based on the Ukrainian and English Languages).

Abstract

The thesis focuses on the comparative and contrastive analysis of the strategic parameters of the communicative interaction between Ukrainian-speaking and English-speaking social media users. It reveals the peculiarities of the communicative conflict and cooperation in the social media discourse of the languages being studied. It also develops the typology of the behavioural communicative strategies within each type of interaction.

The research interprets a communicative strategy as a scheme of fulfilling the communicants’ communicative intention, implemented in speech for achieving a certain result. Meanwhile, the communicative tactic is seen as a specific way to implement the strategy by selecting specific speech genres, speech acts, and speech means to fulfil the communicative intention. Social media discourse is defined as the communicative interaction among social media users in the virtual space. It has interactive, instant, polycoded, indirect, and anonymous nature.

The thesis outlines the communicative behaviour of Twitter and Facebook users. These social media have interactive and syncretic character. The Ukrainian speakers are proved to be less active as Twitter users, preferring Facebook as a communicative space and largely duplicating the posts in both social media. While the English-speaking communicants are more active as Twitter users.

The research substantiates that the social media discourse features two types of communicative interaction – cooperation and conflict. We singled out cooperative strategies of argumentation, informativeness, self-presentation, encouragement, and rituality. We proved that most cooperative strategies are fulfilled in the English and Ukrainian languages equally. The only difference is in the extent of exploiting the informativeness strategy. It prevails in the Ukrainian segment of the social media: the Ukrainian users largely present neutral information within the speech genres of a message or report. While the English speakers rarely represent the neutral information of descriptive or observational nature.

The conflict strategy is represented through discrediting, disagreement, and trolling. In the Ukrainian-language social media discourse, the discrediting strategy is slightly less common when compared to the English-language one. However, there is a certain asymmetry in terms of tactics: in the English language, the blaming strategy prevails, while in Ukrainian, the strategy of insulting is more frequent. The research argues that the disagreement strategy has asymmetrical manifestation at the tactical level: the criticism tactic is far more prevalent in the English language, while self-criticism is almost not detected in the English social media discourse. The trolling strategy is more typical for English social media users. 

The thesis also looks at the concept of verbal aggression within the discrediting strategy. The key means of its implementation in the Ukrainian and English languages are invective and vulgar vocabulary, in particular, zoosemisms, ethnonyms, naming for an individual in terms of their intellectual capacity, naming for corporate positions, human body parts, diseases, naming for an individual in terms of their age and appearance, naming for political parties and political figures. The distinguishing features of the verbal aggression manifestation in the Ukrainian language are zoosemisms, ethnonyms, naming for an individual in terms of their appearance, while the English speakers tend to employ naming for supporters of political parties and political figures and naming for an individual in terms of their intellectual capacity.

The thesis substantiates the comprehensive approach to the comparative and contrastive analysis of the strategic parameters of the communicative interaction within the social media discourse.