Principles of Co-Presence in the Communicative Space of Commentary in an English-Language Academic Forum Based on Researchgate Platform

The article examines the principles of co-presence of communicants in an English-language academic forum. The aim of this paper is to determine the principles of co-presence and the conditions for its implementation in the communicative space of a comment. The material for the study was the initial posts and comments of English-language thematic academic forum ResearchGate since the authors of the Internet posts are actants with institutional affiliation at different levels. In our study, institutionality serves as a condition for determining the above criteria, since it meets the goals of status-oriented academic discourse and insures the quality of its understanding. The following methods where used in the article: contextual analysis to determine the extralinguistic components of the analysis (social context and communicative situation), discourse analysis to identify the features of the speech and communicative behavior of the participants in the dialogue, structural and functional modeling of the dialogue to display the stages of co-presence of the participants in the scientific discussion. The results of the study include: 1) defining the concept of co-presence; 2) listing its qualitative forum features; 3) systemic categorization of the substantive institutionality of forum participants. The obtained data clarify and unify the classical concept of M. M. Bakhtin «in-feeling» in the context of digital transformation of the communicative dynamics of institutional dialogue. The conclusion emphasizes that M. M. Bakhtin’s original concept of endless dialogue is actualized in network forum communication. This article describes for the first time the principles of co-presence taking into account the cognitive status of recipients and contributes to the development of sociolinguistics and discourse studies, offering a new approach to the analysis of the communicative personalities in the framework of the implementation of informative and influencing language functions in professional Internet discourse. The prospects of the research are related to the study of communicative methods and means of presenting the institutional affiliation of the forum authors for a comprehensive understanding of institutional communicative strategies and tactics of co-presence in professional Internet discourse.