Metacommunicative follow-ups in British, German and Russian political webchats

The present study explores discursive functions and cross-cultural peculiarities of follow-ups containing metacommunicative utterances derived from political live webchats. It seeks to identify some typical patterns of online dialogue/polylogue organisation by filtering out discursive functions of metacommunicative follow-ups. It is concluded that politicians and their audiences attempt to shape political interaction by inserting evaluative follow-up moves in question-answer or other types of sequences. Besides, non-evaluative follow-ups are also found to play a role in online political discussion. Both politicians and their audiences sometimes resort to metacommunicative justification, explanation and reasoning to defend their views, redress misunderstanding and otherwise ensure impression management. As for cross-cultural similarities and differences, negative interdiscursive follow-ups that contain complaining sequences and requests to punish underperformance in other genres of political discourse occur most frequently in the British subset of webchat data. Russian politicians criticise the questioners approximately 2.5 times as often as their British counterparts and almost six times as often as German politicians. Neither German users nor German politicians complain about the complexities and challenges of political webchats, whereas both Russian and British users, as well as Russian politicians express doubts in the efficiency of this genre of political multi-party interaction.