Speech Etiquette in Online Communities: Medialinguistics Analysis

The group members are sanctioned for the use of individual speech actions that seem unacceptable to the administrator. In case the rules are violated, the group administrator intervenes: he/she removes statements containing obscene expressions or inappropriate ridicule. In “Leonardo, Dai Vinchik!” group you can find an inscription in the comments, which indicates that the administrator monitors compliance with the group rules, in one way or another: “The comment was deleted by the user or the page administrator." Different speech actions, such as advertising, are subject to regulation. According to the rules of “Our home -- Nevsky district” communication group (example by K. Pusurmanova): Advertising and links to third-party groups are prohibited; advertising can only be placed in the subject “Your advertisements” https://vk.com/topic-37497136_28208666. If you want your advertising on the wall, please, contact the administrator, Anastasia https://vk.com/id3974480.

In groups that are organized out of the leisure sphere, there are stricter rules for the organization of communication. For example, in the “Friends banks.ru” group there is a special function of the site as a form of sanction, which is imposed on those who give inaccurate information in the reviews: In ignore and further for statistics you are ignored. In case of incorrect placement of the participant's comments, he/she receives warnings:

Picture 6.

Administrator HP

ADMINISTRATOR 08.03.2019 11:59 #

To the author: according to p. 3 of Rating Rules, reviews are combined. Please, post situational events as part of a single review without creating additional reviews. Separate posts-comments will be deleted as those violating our rules. Thanks. https://www.banki.ru/fo-

rum/?PAGE_NAME=read&FID=13&TID=294053&PAGEN_1=245

As you can see, in groups whose goal is to get reliable information about someone's activities in the financial sphere, the correct placement of one's comments is a condition of communication politeness.

Discussion of the results of speech material analysis

Speech etiquette in Internet communities is a set of speech norms, rules and principles that determine the selection and use of speech and non-language techniques and tools in the dialogue. They contribute to the preservation of effective successful interaction. Communication in the network community is governed by the SE rules, which guarantee the participant's inclusion into the communication environment; speech form of author's self-expression, prohibitions on certain forms of speech behavior and the imposition of sanctions for violations of these prohibitions. This policy is to ensure that everyone admitted to the communication are free to express themselves creatively, stimulate, on the one hand, the establishment of contacts with a partner suitable according to some parameters, regulate the degree of communication convergence in accordance with its initiator's wish, provide opportunities in different forms to leave/get a response to a particular activity of the communication initiator, as well as to prevent deviations from the existing rules of speech behavior in the network community. Compliance with these rules ensures comfortable communication in the community.

Different speech means can be used to achieve compliance with these rules. The etiquette speech means, stereotypical for the network community and developed in its collective communicative practice, support and further develop it. Metalinguistic analysis aimed at the study of the range of various semiotic tools that contribute to the achievement of media speech communicative settings, and allows to identify these diverse means.

SE partly includes not only traditional means inherent in real communication, but also new ones, introduced into media:

— among traditional forms of etiquette there are customary etiquette words and formulas (pronominal-verbal forms of the 2nd person, words of speech assessment, vocabulary of etiquette);

— among the new ones there are unconventional forms of address in the form of indeclinable nicks, separate types of texts (e.g., Posts “Request for advice”, “Stimulation of emotional reactions”, “Administrator's warning addressing the community”), speech reflexives. All these interacting means and methods allow to realize SE ideas in media-speech.

The “extension” of the dialogue structure to the media conditions is manifested in the change of the “grammar” of the design of the initiating replica that stimulates the movement of communication:

The “extension” of the dialogue structure to the media conditions is manifested in the change of the “grammar” of the initiating remark that stimulates the movement of communication:

1) the remark is unfolded gradually, in accordance with technical capabilities: in a special window, one specifies the topic, then the participant introduces him- self~herself (the nick appears immediately after clicking on the Comments button), next the special “fill in” box is filled with the initiating text;

2) acquaintance with communication participants, as a rule, has a formula representation “avatar + nick (nickname) + time and date of placement”, where both the avatar and the nick are individualized;

3) a replica can be a “live” monologue or a “post”, including a quote, or an image with a quote, or just an image;

4) posts can be different in purpose and style of expression: informative (for example, in professional or specialized communities), involving into discussion (in specialized communities), entertaining (in leisure communities);

5) in order to involve participants into communication, a special ethics and aesthetics of combining verbal and non-verbal is formed in initiating: welcome aphoristic nature, high emotiveness, polemics are praised;

6) iconic signs are widely used: emoticon consisting of icons, images “supporting” modality necessary for group communication -- stimulating the speech activity -- comments that demonstrate friendliness and fun;

7) among the socially approved forms of speech behavior in the community, participants mention wit, so comic expressing means are active, however, the use of this resource is not always successful;

8) the youth audience of the community is characterized by shocking dismissive attitude to all norms: linguistic, communicative, ethical, aesthetic (so-called trash).

Verbal response situations often demonstrate the following courtesy means:

1) a response nature of the statement, addressing the initiator; when calling the initiator with the nick, the latter is not inclined,

2) the formula for the respondent's presentation is the same as the initiator's: “avatar+nickname+time and date of placement”;

3) “connection” to the initiating replica, performed by repeating key words or combinations from the initiating replica,

4) deviation from the topic set by the initiator, because the communication is not face to face.

To improve the quality of communication, for the propaedeutics of aggressiveness in communication, different ways are used:

1) the administrator sets out communication rules in a special type of text where he/she warns of prohibitions concerning certain topics, restrictions on certain speech actions, and sanctions for violations of speech etiquette of the community;

2) the administrator sends a warning to individual “guilty” communicants;

3) participants maintain a distance in communication, using conventional abbreviations, highly specialized jargon, allowing to narrow the audience of communication, mark “their” people, distance “strangers” gently;

4) members of the group give an assessment of someone else's speech using special words that express a negative attitude to someone's statements: flood, ban, trolling, hyip, calling their authors -- flooders, trolls, hypers, etc.

5) technical sanctions are imposed on violators of the rules: sending messages into ignore category, removing excessively rude comments.

Conclusion

Speech etiquette in the community is a resource that helps to create comfort in communication: to provide “communicative conveniences” to express the semantic position of each participant, to pay attention to each other, to preserve emotional comfort, to show courtesy, to neutralize aggression, and to prevent speech crimes. In each group there are internal rules of its existence helping to maintain harmonious interaction of Internet communities' members. In this kind of quasi-communication, a situation of contact initiation, maintaining, and reaction to a communicative provocation can be considered etiquette.

For the comfortable interaction, its own rules for the use of resources that support communication are established. These resources are diverse: standard constructions, organized by the combination of multilevel linguistic means, separate remarks inside the dialogic interaction, texts of a model structure, and meta-text containing an assessment of the communicants' verbal behavior. The combination of traditional and new tools forms a specific system -- SE in virtual communities, which includes a variety of speech resources. The study showed the effectiveness of meta-linguistic analysis of online communication speech organization, which helps to identify not just individual tools and techniques of communication harmonization, but also their place in speech interaction.

One of the heuristic scientific approaches related to the study of audience behavior in Internet communication is the consideration of how speech etiquette varies in online communities. Its meta-linguistic analysis allows to establish the etiquette of the situation, use of verbal and non-verbal means and methods of their explication. The analysis reveals new forms and ways of organizing communities in the network. Such analysis should be supplemented with sociolinguistic research to see and explain the correlation between the social characteristics of the community members and the variability of the speech etiquette rules established within the communities. In general, the interdisciplinary linguistic analysis introduces social and cultural processes related to the mediatization of public consciousness into the field of public visibility. Summing up, we will highlight the most important issues for discussion aimed at clarifying the rules of communicative behavior that guide users of different social networks: 1.What are the communicative values as understood by social media participants? 2. What are the communicative risks and threats to communicative security from the point of view of the researcher and from the point of view of the interaction participants? 3. What speech protection measures against communication threats are taken by participants in different networks? 4. What social characteristics of online communities audience can influence the formation of speech etiquette?

Acknowledgements:

The author is grateful to Julia Konyaeva and Victoria Vasilyeva, Associate Professors of the Media Linguistics Department, St. Petersburg State University, as well as to graduate student Camilla Pusurmanova who provided additional examples of speech etiquette resources use in online communities.

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