Metacommunicative follow-ups in British, German and Russian political webchats
The present study explores discursive functions and cross-cultural peculiarities
of follow-ups containing metacommunicative utterances derived from
political live webchats. It seeks to identify some typical patterns of online
dialogue/polylogue
organisation by filtering out discursive functions of metacommunicative
follow-ups.
It is concluded that politicians and their audiences attempt to shape political
interaction by inserting evaluative follow-up moves in question-answer or
other types of sequences. Besides, non-evaluative follow-ups are also found to
play a role in online political discussion. Both politicians and their audiences
sometimes resort to metacommunicative justification, explanation and reasoning
to defend their views, redress misunderstanding and otherwise ensure
impression management.
As for cross-cultural similarities and differences, negative interdiscursive
follow-ups that contain complaining sequences and requests to punish underperformance
in other genres of political discourse occur most frequently in
the British subset of webchat data. Russian politicians criticise the questioners
approximately 2.5 times as often as their British counterparts and almost six
times as often as German politicians. Neither German users nor German politicians
complain about the complexities and challenges of political webchats,
whereas both Russian and British users, as well as Russian politicians express
doubts in the efficiency of this genre of political multi-party interaction.
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