Communicative strategies in virtual scholarly conflict discussion

The present paper analyzes the communicative strategies and tactics used by participants of academic online discussions in professional social networks in a situation of potential conflict. The relevance of the study is due to the transformation of academic communication in the digital environment, which significantly alters the existing scientific academic as well as leads to the emergence of the new ones which require detailed linguistic analysis. One of such genres is the informal online discussion of researchers in social networks. The analysis in the present study was carried out on the material of 20 English-language forum discussion threads in the ResearchGate social network on the topics of natural sciences and humanities. The analysis included the following stages: identifying the contexts that have the characteristics of conflict communication (disagreement, criticism, etc.); determining the strategies and tactics using contextual and discourse-analytical methods; grouping of the identified strategies. As a result, three main groups of strategies were identified: harmonization, distancing and confrontation strategies. Harmonization strategies include the strategy of cooperation, realized by tactics of rational persuasion, praise, explication of speech intentions and hedging, as well as the strategy of concession. The group of distancing strategies includes the strategy of avoiding discussion and the strategy of ignoring (refusal to continue the dialog). The group of confrontation strategies includes the strategy of discrediting the opponent and the strategy of speech aggression. The most frequent tactics that realize the strategy of discrediting are the tactics of criticizing the sources and the tactics of criticizing the opponent's qualification. The strategy of speech aggression is realized by the tactics of mockery and the tactics of insult. Further research involves a detailed study of specific communicative techniques, as well as language resources used by discussion participants.