E-Participation of US Dwellers: Lexico-Semantic Analysis of Electronic Petitions (Based on the English-Language Segment of the Change.org Platform)

The paper examines the linguistic characteristics of the e-petition texts created by US citizens on the Change.org platform and how they contribute to the Change.org petitions success in the US. The research in question covers all the petitions submitted from 2012 till 2018, which were retrieved from the platform using computer linguistics methods, i.e. Python. These methods together with corpus linguistic methods were also applied to identify the thematic affiliation by means of qualitative and quantitative content-analysis, as well as to construct the semantic fields of the submitted and successful petitions with the help of computer-mediated lexico-semantic analysis based on AntConc software. Thus, the results of the topicalisation have revealed a range of 21 topics covered by the e-petitions; among the most popular are politics, social security, education, criminality and ecology in both submitted and successful petition groups. This finding shows that the platform is widely used as a means of persuading the US government to take actions in these social spheres and it proves to be effective judging by the success rate in these topics. The construction of the semantic fields of both groups has shown that the submitted and successful petitions share most of the lexico-semantic features, i.e. the usage of topic-oriented lexis, different types of named entities, verbs denoting actions to be taken to solve the problem, lexis denoting overstatement and time notions. The difference in lexico-semantic organization of the groups lies in the connotations of the frequent adjectives and their collocations. While the adjectives frequently used in the submitted petition texts may carry both positive and negative emotional colouring, the adjectives in the successful petitions are characterised only by positive connotations. This allows to conclude that the most relevant factor that contributes to petition success is the focus on the positive outcomes a petition may result in, which enables both readers and decision makers to play their active roles in implementing the positive changes.