Internet Commentary as a Secondary Text: Semiotic Production Model

Abstract

The phenomenon of secondary text production has become a focal point due to the integrative nature of this speech product. The possibilities of the Internet greatly enhance the creation of derivative texts, thus expanding the formats of virtual communication. The formation of new genres, as well as the modification of existing ones, brings the problem of studying the mechanisms of text generation to a new level. This paper describes the Internet comment viewed as a secondary textual activity of the individual. An analysis of the network response, posted to online news content, has been conducted from the standpoint of linguopersonological and linguosemiotic approaches to the text construction. Importantly, the iconic and discursive patterns of the event have a significant impact on the reader’s commenting activity. This makes it possible to highlight the semiotic model of secondary text generation. The analysis of text representations of this model shows that the semiotic "view" on the text stimulus can be reflected in the comments at the explicit and implicit levels. The authors propose the typology of the semiotic model including five variants, i.e. metalinguistic, simulation, cross-language, transmutational, and intertextual. The variants can be allocated on the basis of different approaches to source text decoding. The complex nature of the phenomenon of Internet commentary, determined by its secondary character and new communicative environment, provides a comprehensive approach to the study of this type of text. In the future, the study can provide a description of cognitive, axiological, and pragmatic models of text production.