Objective / subjective information strategies in electronic German media

Abstract

The article is devoted to the research of linguistic implementation of objective / subjective information strategies in the complex of electronic texts (article + comments) from modern German media. The material of the research was the primary texts of messages on topical issues from the newspaper ZEIT ONLINE and the magazine Focus Online as well as secondary texts of messages in the form of comments from the general reader. According to the analysis it is obvious that the strategic program in the studied discursive space is a complex multicomponent system due to both the intentional attitudes of the sender of the message and the special conditions of interaction in the Internet space. The topicality of the research is determined by consideration of verbal organization and implementation of the information strategies chosen for analysis and sorted on the objectivity subjectivity scale. The author emphasizes the use of means of different levels of the German language in the process of overlapping and intentional change of strategies. The emphasis is made on the fact that the strategic program of the message sender in the electronic environment can be guessed by the recipient, but there is no further continuation in the comments. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the fact that in electronic German media a commentator, choosing suitable strategies of his own can turn the polemics based on what he read in the article into a new direction. In the course of the language analysis, it is noticed that for an electronic article, strategies of objective information are the most typically ones (detail strategy, information and interpretation strategy, logical persuasion strategy and evasion of the truth strategy), and for an electronic comment, it is more common the choice of subjective information strategy (control over the topic strategy, feelings appeal strategies and evaluation strategies).