ONLINE COMMENTS AS MEANS OF COMMUNICATION (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE)

Globalization and universal informatization have gradually made the World Wide Web the leading source of information. Every year the online media are becoming more and more popular, expanding the target audience, increasing information coverage and today the Internet is a separate type of communicative space into which the usual forms of human communication are gradually penetrating, forming new images, concepts, meanings that are different from the traditional off-line sphere. The purpose of the study is to show some special aspects of modern Internet communication based on the material of online comments to a political article. The article deals with the online comments, their genre characteristics and main types based on the pragmatic functions, some lexical features of online comments in web-based mass media political discourse are analysed as well.