Gender-Relevant Features of Imposing Expert Opinion in Online Communication of Pandemic Period

Abstract

The article is devoted to the identification of gender peculiarities in applying the strategy of expert opinion demonstration as one of the ways to manipulate recipients on the Internet. On the basis of linguistic analysis of English blogs with expert content selected by the method of continuous sampling, specific speech tactics which express gender identity in the process of expert opinion presentation are characterized. The interdependence between the functional load of the blogs and the speech tools used by the bloggers is established and analyzed. It was revealed that female experts implemented the tactics of uncertainty, justification and intimacy expressed in conditional sentences, just to convey hesitation, means of semantic hyperbolization of speech, appeal to another person's opinion and the results of other people's research, quotes, dialogicity of utterances in the blogs. The blogs created by male experts featured implementation of the tactics of we-community, knowledge demonstration, intimidation, beliefs with high degree of textual cohesion, description of negative scenario in case of the expert's recommendations ignoring, rhetorical questions and adverb instead embedding, negative constructions and verbs in the imperative mood. The identified tactics and speech means used for these tactics implementation are qualified as gender markers of manipulative influence on the user through the expression of expert opinion.