Interjections as Means of Expressing Empathy in Russian-language Network Communication

The work is devoted to the peculiarities of the use of interjections by Internet communicants as a means of expressing empathy in comments-reactions to posts on the social network TikTok. It has been established that discursive practices of compassion involve a significantly larger number of users than practices of co-rejoicing, and, accordingly, demonstrate a wider range of interjection reactions. The author analyzed 60 Russian-language network polylogues (threads), the unifying discourse-forming feature of which is the collective intentional state of rejoicing. Based on linguopragmatic and discursive approaches, the relationship between the realized intentional-illocutionary meanings of interjections and their regulatory-dialogue potential in communication mediated by a network format is considered. When creating emotiogenic content, the author of a video post can offer the audience interjection stimuli, presented in the form of captions on the message or in the form of hashtags. The goal of the initiator of network communication is to gain approval and support from other network users and influence their emotional state. The analysis showed that in network “oral-written” communication, other participants in the communication react interactively to interjections used by some users; as a result, not only repetitions are traced in the virtual polylogue, but also entire chains of the same or similar interjections in semantics and pragmatics units. The repertoire and ways of using interjections as a means of expressing the emotions of online interlocutors demonstrate their conditioning by the media culture of TikTok as a special digital platform. Specific phenomena of such media culture include users’ ideas about acceptable norms of emotional manifestations and cognitive scenarios of emotions that are consistently embodied in communication. Observations of the use of interjections have shown that communication on social networks can have a quasi- or pseudo-empathic meaning.

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