The article discusses readers’ comments to online news articles in terms of their orientation and specifics. On the one hand, readers’ comments could be directed at the source article, its content or form, and the personality of the politicians mentioned in the text. Another vector of communication arises between readers who react to previous readers’ comments, which might lead to multi-vector dialogues and even conflicts between participants in online communication. In addition, a new communication channel is openned when the original text becomes a trigger for presenting commenter’s own positions which is not related to the main topic of the publication. Data excerpted from four popular Bulgarian online media were processed by means of content analysis. Seventeen different types of readers’ comments were identified and discussed in terms of their direction, frequency of occurrence and potential for provoking further comments and sustaining discussion among readers. Analysis showed that there is no single classification of readers’ reactions, and their direction depends on a number of factors, such as the topic of message, its relevance, commenter’s attitude to the topic, the number, quality and direction of previous comments, and thereader’s emotional involvement. Most numerous are comments on article topic, followed by reactions to previous readers’ opinions. Significantly fewer are negative reactions to people’s mentality and other commentators’ opinions, and to the article quality. Comments on images accompanying the text, on individual polititians, politics in general, journalists, moderators, and topics not directly related to the article, have smaller or zero generating potential.

The paper is devoted to the possibilities of creating a comic effect based on linguocultural signs and concepts in forum comments to media texts. The problem of the comic is studied in the context of the study of value essences and national-cultural meanings, which form the basis of the worldview of the national-cultural community. The material of the study is forum comments on Bulgarian online media publications or reposts of media articles in social networks. Due to the fact that the specificity of modern online communication is the relativity of the disposition of the author-addressee, the addressee is involved in the discussion of the topic, since both media texts and comments on them are usually read. Forum comments as posts written by the addressee under media texts, create a kind of network communication that allows its participants to evaluate the news or express an opinion about the content of the media text and, in some cases, to simply argue with or without reason. The formation of a comic effect on the basis of linguistic and cultural phenomena in forum communication is an important linguo-mental characteristic of the perception of the world by a national-cultural community, as well as a tool for assessing the preservation of cultural tradition. The analysis of linguocultural material involved in creating a comic effect in comments to media texts demonstrates the presence of several types of precedent, the use of phraseological units (paremias, citations, aphorisms), metaphors and concepts. The “transposition” of linguistic and cultural phenomena is based on the discrepancy between the internal and external image, on the violation of the usual syntagmatic relations of linguistic units, the actualization and modification of frame-slot connections, and the ambivalence of semantic realization. The article is based on the report that is going to be presented at the XVIII International Congress of Slavists in 2025.

A number of approaches to media texts tend to apply an interactive model to communication, and the texts are seen are intrinsically dialogic, relying on the receivers’ subjective interpretation of meaning and activation of intertextual relations. In addition, media texts are increasingly used as material for linguistic analysis with the aim to reveal how their linguistic potential is utilized by journalists to convey messages and ideas, and influence the audience. The paper discusses the pragmatic functions of interrogatives and the way they are realized in media text, more specifically in newspaper articles’ headlines, leads and bodies excerpted from British and American online media over a period of two months. The analysis is mapped against previous research of interrogatives in the field of pragmatics and medialinguistics. The main findings show that interrogatives in headlines realize a range of pragmatic roles when used on their own or as part of paratactic or hypotactic complexes. These roles are closely dependent on their syntactic and semantic features and can range from attracting and focusing readers’ attention, to urging readers to think about issues, look for certain types of answers in the text, or think of their own answers or reactions. Headlines can be expanded or clarified in the sub-headings, lead and main body of the article. In the main body, interrogatives help to structure and authenticate writer’s dialogue with the audience, making the narrative or argumentation more emphatic, and soliciting active commitment to issues, feedback and empathy from the audience. Furthermore, some topics of high public interest and importance might lead to an increase in the number of questions in media texts. Further research of larger and more varied thematically material might throw light on the way different topics affect the frequency and distribution of pragmatic roles of interrogatives in media texts.

This analysis is a part of a bigger study on the presentation of Muslim women in the media. The focus here is on Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim Somali-born woman in American Congress, and more specifically on the latest publications on Omar which delve into her personal family life and the alleged marriage she has entered into with her brother, so that she can provide him with a green card for the USA. The topic presents a cross-section of several major fields of study such as feminism, media studies, and culture studies as the emphasis is on the biased media representation intended to diminish the real worth of a woman politician who is a carrier of several different identities, namely: gender, religious, ethnic, and class. The corpus for this study consists of 42 articles published in various online media over a period of four months from January 2020 to April 2020. The paper argues that first, the presentation Ilhan Omar enjoys is gendered and second, that it is subjected to the stereotypical image of Muslim women as submissive and silent, being of a lower status than men, especially in a male-dominated field such as politics. In addition, it is also argued that although Omar breaks the existing stereotypes of Muslim women, the way media present her actually reinforces the preconceived ideas she refutes. To prove the above, the main methods of analysis applied are Critical Discourse Analysis along with Multi-modal analysis when the non-verbal part of the presentation on the image is concerned.