"Naive" Legitimization Perceived as a Political or Discourse Phenomenon by the Recipient of Non-Professional Internet Discourse

The non-professional political discourse is a rapidly developing Internet discursive practice. The research featured the legitimization mechanism in Internet comments and the tools of pragmatic linguistics that affect the perception of political discourse by its senders, i.e. commentators. The author identified and systematized how the inner circle of readers perceived political Internet comments in an act of "naive" (unprofessional) legitimization. The discourse analysis of paired lines involved secondary texts, i.e., root posts to a political article (K1), and tertiary texts (K2), i.e., reactions of the virtual community. The analysis made it possible to determine 1) which of the legitimization options, i.e., political or discursive, was registered by the recipient in the core comment; 2) the perceptual trends in the recipient’s discourse, taking into account the binary nature of personal thinking (reception-plus or reception-minus). The research revealed a certain heterogeneity of the recipient’s perception of the comments in terms of legitimization. A comment defending one’s position could be perceived as discursive act of political legitimization; a comment that legitimized one’s opinion could be associated with legitimization as a political phenomenon. The reception-plus and reception-minus reactions proved variable. Legitimizing one’s word in (K1) did not necessarily cause a discursive (K2) reaction to the legitimization discourse: it might focus on its referential, i.e., political aspect.