In accordance with the laws of the genre: the peculiarities of using uppercase letters in Internet memes and postcards

Abstract

Internet memes and postcards as the popular carriers of Internet communications, implement new, simplified in literary and aesthetic level forms of communication. The process of creating such genres entails departure from orthographic rules, among which is the use of uppercase letters. The subject of the research is the determination of peculiarities of practical use of uppercase letters in Internet memes and postcards. The goal is to follow the observance of orthographic rules in these genres regarding the use of uppercase letters, as well as to identify the stylistic peculiarities of these two genres and characteristic use of uppercase letters. The relevance and scientific novelty of this article consists in examination of content creation for Internet memes and postcards, rather than memes themselves. Extralinguistic roots of the problem of liberal use or inobservance of uppercase letters are detected on the linguistic basis. The research leans on the content from open sources. The conclusion is made that both linguistic genres represent the examples of mass communications addressed primarily to the users with lower aesthetic demand; different linguistic gradation lead to certain departure from orthographic rules in both genres; this may not be progressive from the perspective of language development, but rather be oriented towards primitivization of content.