SPEECH ACT OF AGREEMENT / DISAGREEMENT IN THE DISCOURSE OF ONLINE COMMENTARIES (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE ARTICLE BY G. MONBIOT “COVID LIES COST LIVES”)
Abstract
The article is devoted to the study of the communicative and pragmatic characteristics of the speech act (hereinafter – SA) of agreement / disagreement in the discourse of newspaper commentaries on the material of 452 commentaries on George Monbiot’s article “Covid lies cost lives” published in “The Guardian” on January 27, 2021. The object of the research is the SA of agreement / disagreement in the discourse of newspaper commentaries. The subject of the article is communicative and pragmatic characteristics of the SA of agreement / disagreement. It has been established that the SA of agreement / disagreement in the discourse of commentaries on the articles in the English-language online newspapers is a part of the remote dialogue between the author and readers, is used in the written form and is realized exclusively through the visual channel. It is determined that the analyzed type of SA is optional for the discourse of commentaries to online articles. It activates the dialogic potential of the assertives, which do not require a mandatory response. The addresser, the author of the first speech move in the analyzed exchange (dialogic unity), is always the author of the article. For the author of the article, this speech move is the only one, the others are reactive. The principal characteristics of the SA of agreement / disagreement are established. Commentaries containing SA of agreement / disagreement have been found to be mainly evaluative statements. Explicit direct SA of agreement / disagreement are found in less than 1.5% of the corpus. Implicitly expressed SA of disagreement more often deny, refute, confront the addresser’s theses, and particular counterarguments are declared thus proving the argumentativeness of the analyzed discourse. Implicitly expressed agreement is mostly partial, the SA of agreement also being an example of argumentative discourse. The prospect of this research is considered to be a more detailed quantitative study of the means of SA of agreement / disagreement explication in the discourse of commentaries to online articles of the English-language online newspapers.
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