Media discourse; commercial websites; manipulation; mental models; Critical Discourse Analysis; interpersonal metafunction; communication strategies; positive face; negative face

This paper addresses the construction of identities and relationships as a communication strategy in commercial websites. Based on a corpus of Czech and British sites, the study applies an approach grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis and identifies ways in which text-producers attempt to create simulated identities for themselves and their readers, manipulating the reader?s mental models of the communicative situation for commercial gain. The author then addresses the texts? construction of virtual relationships between the producer and the reader, both in terms of distance or closeness (negative and positive ?face?) and in terms of the equality or inequality of status of the two participants. The study also discusses the extent to which the corpus reveals contrastive differences in strategies and discourse preferences between the British and Czech websites.