Ways of expressing public sentiments in the texts of politically-oriented internet community in the VKontakte social network

The article discusses the most typical ways of expressing public mood that are employed by the participants in discussions in a politically-oriented Internet community. Public mood is understood as a form of mass political consciousness' existence. The study was conducted on the material of texts posted in the Politika (Politics) community of the VKontakte social network from September 21, 2022 to January 6, 2023. On the basis of the Internet posts and comments to them, the research revealed the preferences of Internet users in choosing the pragmatic type of utterance. The pragmatic type is determined by the predominance of a certain component of public moods (emotional, rational, or rational-emotional). The correspondence between the prevailing type of the Internet users' reaction and the pragmatic type of utterance was established taking into account the speech act theory developed by J. Austin and J. Searle and the typology of speech acts proposed by N. I. Formanovskaya. The paper points out the predominance of the emotive dominant in the structure of the Russianspeaking Internet users' public attitudes. It is realized in the employment of mostly rogative, directive, and representative speech acts in the texts under analysis. Other types of speech acts (expressives, contactives) mainly implement the phatic function of communication in the Internet community. The paper concludes that the use of the identified types of speech acts contributes to the expression of subjective experiences of the community members. It also allows the authors of the texts to propose their own scenarios for the development of the political situation under discussion and to influence the formation of attitudes of other Vkontakte users.