DISCURSIVE STRATEGIES OF BUSINESS BLOGS

Theaim of this research is to describe the discursive strategies that determine the character of communicative interaction in the discourse of business blogs in English. The theoretical basis of the work is the use of traditional approaches to communicative (discursive) strategies and contextual macro-strategies by Western and Russian linguists (T. van Dijk, Y.Varzonin, V.Kashkin, E.Klyuev). The research is done on the material of a blog on the website of the famous U.S. business media - Harvard Business Review. Having analysed one of its threads, the researcher describes the discursive strategies of the initiating article (the narrative) and dialogical answering strategies of the opponent bloggers. Thus, in the beginning the following aspects are described: introducing thematic binary oppositions of the social actors under discussion, introducing the key semantic topic and forming a specific syntactic structure of the text. Then the researcher identifies and illustrates the ways of realization for the tree types of the bloggers' discursive strategies: 1. cooperative: a) agreeing with the author, usually accompanied with describing one's own experience and with thanks to the author or a positive evaluation of the article, b) asking the author to give his/her views on other issues, that is, indirect acknowledging that the author is right and his/her opinion is worth knowing, c) acknowledging that the author is right via comparing him/her with a famous expert; 2) argumentative (confrontational): a) disagreeing with the author, his/her opinion and conclusions, sometimes partially or disappointment; 3) self-presenting: a) broadening the theme and fact presenting, without subjective evaluating or direct agreeing / disagreeing with the author, b) an attempt to summarise the contents of the article basing on one's own opinions. This system can serve as a basis for classifying discursive strategies of current business blogging in English.

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