Abstract
We investigate the relationship between Engagement and constructiveness in online news comments by analyzing the frequency and type of Engagement expressions in a corpus of English and Russian comments, following the Appraisal framework. The comments in question, 10,000 words in each language, were posted in response to opinion articles in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail and the Russian online news channel RT. In the context of online news comments, users generally characterize constructive comments as posts that tend to create a civil dialogue through remarks that are relevant to the article and do not provoke an emotional response. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses, we conclude that the language of constructive comments is more explicitly subjective in both languages. The main difference in the use of Engagement expressions in constructive and non-constructive comments lies along the lines of certainty/uncertainty and reliability/unreliability. As for cross-linguistic differences, it seems that English constructive comments place emphasis on the reliability of a commenter’s knowledge, while Russian constructive comments employ more modals of necessity, which have a prescriptive function.
About the authors
Radoslava Trnavac is Assistant Professor at HSE University, Russia. Her main research interests include the study of evaluation, relational and referential types of coherence, and intercultural pragmatics. She is currently working at the intersection of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. This paper is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University).
Maite Taboada is Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her research is interdisciplinary, combining discourse analysis and computational linguistics. In discourse analysis, she studies the mechanisms for coherence in discourse. In computational linguistics, she develops methods and algorithms to process discourse structure for different applications.
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