Speech etiquette of professional online communities

ABSTRACT

Networking within online communities is recognized as a new way of social interaction. The authors study Russian Internet communities that unite members of the same profession – professional social networks. In such communities, speech etiquette is formed under the influence of communicative values that are, in turn, formed under the influence of values that are determined by a particular profession. We search for a correlation between professional social networks’ speech etiquette features and the profession of their members, and raise the questions: What communication goals are pursued by the users of the communities studied? What communicative situations form the professional social networks’ speech etiquette? What are the communicative values of an online group for professionals? What kinds of professionals’ speech activity may influence the formation of speech etiquette in professional social networks? Speech activity of professional social networks was analysed in ‘Dentistry’, ‘Overheard in the police’, and ‘Law dot ru’.

KEYWORDS:

• Online community
• speech etiquette
• humorous communication
• professional social networks
• online audience

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the post-graduate students of the Department of MediaLinguistics of St. Petersburg State University Sofia Kulazhko and Anastasia Samsonova for their practical assistance in the selection of professional social networks. We are also grateful to Professor L.R. Duskaeva for organizing the working group around this promising research topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In accordance with a recommendation of the Ethical Guidelines 3.0 published by the Association of Internet Researchers, the discourse we study has public nature; therefore, participants of open communities in VKontakte implicitly accept that their usernames and texts are free for scientific use without their consent.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation under [grant number 19-18-00530].

Notes on contributors

Viktoria Vasileva

Viktoria Vasileva is an Associate Professor of St Petersburg State University. She has authored more than 100 scholarly articles, and has been a member of the authors’ teams of several textbooks on stylistics and journalism, as well as scientific monographs on media linguistics. She has been teaching stylistics, literary editing, and speech technique to journalism students.

Liubov Ivanova

Liubov Ivanova is a senior lecturer at the Department of Medialinguistics of St Petersburg State University. In 2018, she defended her candidate (PhD) dissertation ‘Speech representation of intertextual dialogicity in the media discourse of international relations.’