Receptive and productive activity of non-professional Internet discourse participants

The paper examines the non-professional Internet discourse generated by the authors of Internet comments. It is viewed through the prism of the categories of intentionality, as characteristics of a text that has the capacity to express one or another intention of its author, and as communicative intentions realised by a person who simultaneously plays two communicative roles: the reader and the author. The textual data demonstrate that in Internet commenting, an unprofessional personality implements both reception and production within one text unit. The implementation of these global intentions of non-professional Internet discourse is carried out at different levels: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. The analysis of textual markers of receptive and productive intentions allows us to establish patterns in their implementation through three main text types: cohesion, diffusion and overlapping. Each of the text types has several variants. Remarkably, when generating a text according to the cohesion model, the authors of the comments consistently and explicitly demonstrate the transition from reception to production, as indicated by discursive words, marking the syntactic organization of the commentary. A more complex variant of the implementation of reception and production within the same Internet text is the text type called “diffusion”. In this model, reception and production are realized simultaneously, due to the closely intertwined markers of reaction and production in the text at the levels of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Reception is established at the level of non-linear text liaisons as well as semantic and pragmatic characteristics of an Internet comment. In the third model, reception and products are realized using the same textual means. Therefore, the specified text type is called ”overlapping”. In the commentary constructed according to the overlapping principle, the receptive and productive activity of a non-professional personality is explicated at the level of vertical connections of the text and its contextual characteristics. A quantitative analysis of text types according to the selected criteria shows that in Russian-language discourse, the most common variant of the implementation of reception and products is cohesion. The diffusion model is more often presented in English-language discourse. In general, the dual communicative status of the authors of Internet comments was revealed in 19.5% of English-language texts and 27.4% of Russianlanguage texts. The prospects of the study include conducting a longitudinal experimental study of the intentionality of non-professional Internet discourse.