In this paper, we examine the introduction of a blog-like commenting feature on the website of the UK newspaper The Guardian. An area that has received less attention is the influence of Web 2.0 on more established online formats, in particular its influence on news sites. Another Web 2.0 site that is receiving an increasing amount of attention is Twitter, with a conference dedicated to the language of twitter hosted at Lancaster University in early 2013, for example. From a linguistic perspective, the part of the social web that has received the most attention has been the blog, following early work by Herring et al (2005). The growth of these more interactive websites has been well documented since the ‘first glimmerings of Web 2.0’ were noted at the end of the 1990s (Di Nucci, 1999: 32). As we have explored elsewhere, Web 2.0 also includes blogs (Kehoe & Gee 2012) and ‘folksonomies’: sites which allow users to assign single word keywords (‘tags’) to videos, photographs or general web content (Kehoe & Gee 2011). Web 2.0, or the social web, encompasses wiki-based sites which allow users to collaborate on production of texts (Wikipedia being most famous example), and popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Whereas the first generation of websites were information sources designed to be read passively, second generation websites allow users to interact with online content and participate in its creation. In recent years, there has been a growth in so called ‘Web 2.0’ technologies. The analysis is illustrated with examples from English and Polish. It is suggested that the semantic prosodies of some triggers exihibit a universal character, while some others remain language-specific. Louw, 1993).Instances of the triggers with some forms of explicit or implicit negation in their conceptual/semantic structure are discussed and an attempt is made to show to what extent the items in the same utterance or in a larger unit of speech (say, speech event or a paragraph) harmonise with the negative nature of their triggers. If the semantic expectations are overridden by the occurrence of items different to those expected, the result may be figures of speech such as irony or paradox (e.g. Sinclair, 1994), which, in analogy to phonology, is understood as a fairly systematic spread of a feature from a ‘trigger’ to other linguistic units which I call ‘targets’. This phenomenon is referred to as semantic harmony or semantic prosody (cf. The hypothesis defended in the paper refers to the existence of a certain aura of meaning connected with individual lexical items which spreads over the senses of their neighbours by creating specific semantic expectations.
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