(Опубликовано в журнале «SENTENTIA. European Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences» №1, 2016)

29/04/2016

Introduction

Modern scientific paradigm gives clear concepts of the relationship between language and gender of its speaker. Gender studies throughout the decades highlight the key points when studying communicative messages of different styles and genres. Widely regarded as the founder of gender and feminist linguistics, Robin Lakoff described the verbal behaviour of women in her book “Language and woman's place” [10]. In national linguistics gender studies is firstly concerned with issues on gender reflected in language use. The aim of this approach is to describe and explain how people of both sexes are manifested in language (nominative system, lexical units, syntax, gender, etc. are primarily investigated), what traits are attributed to men and women and what semantic areas they are most significantly/clearly expressed in. Secondly, researches study verbal and, generally, communicative behavior of men and women with its typical gender strategies and tactics, gender-based specific choice of lexical units, ways to achieve success in communication, preferences in the choice of vocabulary, syntax, etc., i.e. female and male peculiarities of speaking [4; 5].

It seems reasonable to analyze gender differences and correspondences of self-presentation texts, since self-presentation as a special type of communicative message in modern society is one of the most important ways to create one’s own image. American researchers originally discussed timeliness of self-presentation studies, in their works the notions “self-presentation” and “impression management” were used as synonyms. Research publications in linguistics were initially based on the writings of psychologists and sociologists having studied the features of social identity in the process of interpersonal dialogue. The founders of the specified scientific approach are E. Goffman [3], C. Cooley [2], etc.

Despite the necessary skills of drawing up high quality self-presentation texts, not all issues related to the texts construction have been resolved. The article is concerned with communicative and speech strategies and communicative and speech tactics through which free-text self-presentations (without multiple choice option) made up by women and men in online dating sites are represented.

We interpret “communication strategy” as “the outcome the communication act is directed to” [7, p. 320], while “speech strategy” as “a decision on the sequence of speech acts defining the speaker’s speech behavior in terms of choosing the best means and ways to achieve goals” [6, p. 28]. Therefore, the concept “communication strategy” is wider in meaning than the concept “speech strategy”. They correspond to the categories “the whole” and “the part” respectively.

The concepts “communication tactics” and “speech tactics” have the same relations as “speech tactics is a speech act which corresponds to a particular stage in the implementation of a strategy” [8, p. 176], “communication strategy” is “a set of practical steps in the actual process of verbal interaction” [11, p. 98].

This research includes the analysis of gender differences manifested in the analyzed text messages; also it covers some observations made on convergence and divergence in choosing strategies and tactics used by Russian / English speakers. Self-presentations of men and women aged 18 and above presented in the Russian-speaking (trulolo.com, mamba.ru, mylove.ru) and English-speaking (site4dating.com, datingdirect.com, loveawake.com, friendsdatingagency.eu) online dating sites form the factual research base. The base was formed in March-April 2015. The fragment of self-presentation in which a definite strategy / tactics is verbalized is used as a unit of analysis. The data selected for the study were analyzed by means of three methods: descriptive, comparative.

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