Lexical and grammatical means of expression of dominant assessment in media speech of virtual language personality in blogs: gender aspect

Abstract

The aim of the study is to present an analysis of the lexical and grammatical means of expression of dominant assessment in the speech behavior of the Russian-speaking and English-speaking virtual language personality in blogs, depending on belonging to a particular gender. The research material is a card index of more than 200 posts of beauty bloggers on the social network in 2021. There were used 15 accounts of the Russian-speaking and 15 accounts of the English-speaking addressers. All blogger’s virtual language personalities position themselves on the Internet as men, transgender people (mtf – male-to-female) and women. In total more than 3,800 small syntactic groups have been analyzed. The following research methods were used in the work: the lexico-semantic, lexico-grammatical, and stylistic analyses, method of objective pragmalinguistic analysis combining modified content analysis and the comparison method. When studying the differences in the media speeches among the English- and Russian-speaking virtual communicative personalities, several lexical differences in the speeches of the women, men and transgender people were identified. Thus, among the Russian-speaking bloggers the highest percentage of negative attitudes and in general the brightest emotional coloring of lexis and grammar constructions was observed in the men’s media speech despite the widespread stereotype about the greater emotional intensity of women’s media speech. The women in their media speech tend to prevail in the formation of positive assessment. For the transgender people in blogs, all three indicators of the formation of assessment using lexical and grammatical means occupy a middle position between the media speech of the women and the men, which indicates the presence of female and male traits in the media speech of the transgender people. For the English-speaking virtual communicative personalities in the media speeches of the women and the men, all three indicators are approximately equal, while for the transgender people the index of the formation of a negative attitude using lexical and grammatical means is twice exceeded, and the indicator of the formation of a positive attitude through vocabulary is twice reduced. In general, the media speech of the English-speaking transgender people in blogs is characterized by a more open and more emotionally colored lexical and grammatical constructions in media speech. The transgender bloggers share all the events from their lives, regardless of whether they are positive or negative, which indicates maximum self-presentation and maximum attention of Internet users to their language personality and lifestyle among Internet users. It seems promising to consider the linguopragmatic aspect of gender self-presentation of virtual language personalities in blogs, to identify the main tactics of their self-presentation in media space.