Pragmatic functions of discourse markers in Internet communication

Abstract

This work explores discourse markers (DMs), which assess the reported on the scale of reliability/uncertainty in various subgenres of the social network VKontakte. We analyzed more than 370 statements with DMs in messages and user comments in the official public page of Cherepovets (https://vk.com/cherinfo_ru) and news messages on the personal page of Cherepovets mayor V.E. Germanov (https://vk.com/germanovve). The aim of the work is to highlight the features of DMs' functioning in various subgenres of a social network. The hypothesis of the research is that DMs, as units devoid of denotative meaning, implement various pragmatic functions in Internet communication, e.g., explicate the constitutive features of Internet genres, contribute to a person's self-presentation and written text's discursivization, reduce emotional deficit and switch micro-topics. To identify DMs' functions, a four-stage technique was used: (1) determination and comparison of DMs' frequency in the analyzed subgenres and the Russian National Corpus; (2) based on the frequency, identification of nuclear and peripheral DMs, (3) analysis of DMs' context semantics in comparison with dictionary data. (4) revealing the specifics of DMs' use in different subgenres of the social network. The analysis confirmed the hypothesis. DMs implement pragmatic functions in various subgenres of a social network. The subgenre of the commentary is closest to oral discourse, emotional and subjective. DMs fully explicate these constitutive features of the commentary genre. In the hybrid subgenre of news messages on the personal page of the mayor, which bears the features of a personal blog, DMs are used to make the text dialogic, to interact with the reader, and to have a casual conversational style. In the subgenre of news in the official community of Cherepovets, DMs are used less often, which is due to the journalistic text's striving for objectivity and emotionlessness. However, DMs are used when reporting direct speech and also appear in creolized news, in the section from readers #cherinfo_proposal, and in reposts from other sources. As polyfunctional units, whose main purpose is to build interaction between the addresser and the addressee, DMs are used in contexts in various functions. Firstly, in addition to expressing confidence/uncertainty, they help to eliminate emotional deficit, realizing irony and aggression. Secondly, DMs allow the addresser to control the addressee's attention by including new micro-topics in the reported, focusing on what the communicant sees as important or significant. Finally, DMs also help communicants to add features of a conversational style, emotionality, and dialogization to written speech. We refer to this phenomenon as the discursivization of the text, by which we mean an unconscious or conscious attempt by an author to endow their text with an internal dialogization, to bring the written mode of discourse closer to the oral one.