Maria Sivenkova is an Assoc. Professor at the Department of Communication Studies, Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus. After defending her PhD thesis in 2006, she has been teaching business communication and organizational communication, linguistic pragmatics, and she has been supervising undergraduate and postgraduate research. Her scientific interests lie in the fields of business communication, Internet communication, political communication, cross-cultural pragmatics and discourse analysis. In particular, she investigates the functioning of metapragmatic moves in political text and dialogue of various genres, such as parliamentary debates, political interviews, politicians’ blog posts. E-mail: maria.sivenkova@gmail.com