‘n most…’: Internet rating as a speech genre

Abstract

The research is focused on the genre of Internet rating (an article representing a group of homogeneous objects in the form of a ranked, most often numbered list) and is based on approx. 600 texts of Internet rankings (2019–2020) from approx. 120 sites. The article analyzes the following characteristics of the Internet rating: general speech-genre, structural, thematic (thematic areas, key lexemes, semantics and pragmatics), evaluative (ranking principles, author’s subjectivity, values) ones. A lot of attention is paid to such speech-genre dominants of the Internet rating as the principles of assessment / ranking, author’s subjectivity, expression, as well as some factors of cultural borrowing (“ratingness”). Three parts of the Internet rating structure have been identified: 1) the heading, which the content aggregator brings to the news browser; 2) a description of the Internet rating; 3) the ranked objects themselves. The article singles out and describes the linguistic markers of the Internet rating genre and its main structural types, as well as the most common topics of Internet ratings: cinema (TV shows, cartoons, anime), books / writers, signs of the Zodiac, the world of cats and dogs, tourism; the most common numbers (10, 5, no number, 3, 7, 1, 6, 4, 20); illocutionary types of Internet ratings (entertaining ones prevail, among non-entertaining ones advice and (presumably) hidden advertising stand out) / The author offers their quantitative indicators as well. The article analyzes the principles of ranking objects of Internet ratings and their relationship with the image of the author and addressee of the Internet rating. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the author tries, on the one hand, to prove the objectivity of the rating (to refer to the conducted research, survey, authoritative opinion, etc.), on the other hand, to explicate their subjectivity (for example, to encourage readers to express their own opinions).