The communicative category ‘speech clarity’ in the digital dialogue between the government and society (based on official responses to requests of citizens on the social network VKontakte)

The article deals with the communicative category ‘speech clarity’ in official responses to requests and messages of citizens in the social networking service VKontakte. Following the analysis of scientific literature, the authors of the study conclude that speech clarity is one among such characteristics of speech as accessibility, comprehensibility, intelligibility, and simplicity, these opposed to the lack of clarity, unreliability, ambiguity, as well as semantic and structural complexity. The authors show the following linguistic means to make speech unclear and lead to speech ambiguity: terms, officialese, loanwords, archaisms, and neologisms, lexemes denoting ambiguity, abstract nouns, polynomial phrases, complex sentences with different types of subordinate clauses, passive voice, and impersonal sentences. In the course of study more than 300 texts were analyzed and ways of increasing speech clarity were identified. These include replacing of officialese and legal terms with common and concrete vocabulary, the use of proper names instead of generalizing generic names, clarification of legal terms, substantiating the answer to a citizen’s request by reference to a relevant regulatory act, the use of simple sentences, intentional structuring of multi-component statements. As part of research, the authors conducted an experimental pilot study aiming to determine text complexity and readability of official responses using the online service Textometer (https://textometr.ru/). It is concluded that the digital dialogue between the authorities and society requires the formation of a new official communicative style. This communicative style is meant to contribute to the development of innovative types of speech interaction between the government and citizens in social networks and messengers.