WAYS OF CONSTRUCTING GENDER IDENTITY IN INTERNET DISCOURSE (BASED ON GERMAN SPORTS BLOGS)

The article is devoted to the study of personal and situational parameters for communication within Internet-discourse regarding its gender aspects; potential gender shifts which are influenced by electronic communication. Language personality of men and women in German sports blogs was analysed at three levels, namely: verbal-semantic, linguo-cognitive, and pragmatic levels. The study of the verbal-semantic level found that personal and situational parameters of communication are manifested on Internet-blogs in the following way: women retain their emotionality in the blogosphere due to the more frequent use of emotional and expressive vocabulary; women's speech is more normative while men's speech can be characterised by the more frequent use of colloquial expressions; female authors are more reader oriented because they use rhetorical questions more often; male authors tend to focus on objective information and are more competent in the field of sports because they have a greater tendency of using proper names, numbers and dates, and abbreviations more often. Women try to impersonate themselves with the readers, while men focus more on themselves. Linguo-cognitive analysis revealed that men associate sport with politics, fighting, and success. At the same time women associate sport with shows, performances, and theatre. On the pragmatic level men and women prefer relatively the same cognitive speech strategies. They are: forecasting, intensification generalization, involvement, and repetition. However, the priority of using them is different among men and women. The conducted analysis leads to a conclusion that the speech of men and women contains differences which demonstrate the traditional views about gender-marked speech behavior. It was found that electronic communication does not have a significant impact on the process of gender formation and in German sports blogs men and women retain their gender identity