Linguistics of New Media as a Challenge to Traditional Linguistics of the Past
The paper views new approaches in multimodal computer-mediated communication. One of constituencies of this approach includes interactive multimodal platforms. The sites of USA congressmen are rendered as such platforms and considered within political computer-mediated communication discourse. Thus, the paper focuses on linguistic and stylistic properties of mediatexts in the English-language political internet-discourse as well as communicative strategies and tactics used for their construction. The English-language electronic political mediatexts are represented as a set of mediatexts distinguished on the basis of the following typological parameters: distribution channel, the image of the author, the image of the addressee, the method of presentation, the dominant theme, and functional-genre affiliation. Among the communicative strategies of the mediatexts construction are the next: informing, self-presentation, and consolidation, each of them is implemented in specific tactics via verbal and nonverbal means. The main communicative attributes of these mediatexts are simplicity, informative value, expressive nature, persuasive nature, intertextuality. The conducted analysis shows that this multimodal computer-mediated communication through interactive multimodal platforms gives rise to new forms of communication that are distinct from face-to-face communication, with their own unique affordances, which are both less than and more than face-to-face interactions. In this sense, it can provide fertile ground for theorizing about language in digital interaction, as well as about appearance of new approach - Linguistics of New Media.