Linguistic Markers of Communicative-Cultural Memory of Generations in the Reflection of the Social Network

Abstract

This chapter presents a new approach to the sociolinguistic analysis of text data from the VKontakte social network. As new sources of big data for linguistic analysis, social networks are a reasonable basis for interdisciplinary research. On the one hand, the communication represented in social networks is predominantly verbal. On the other hand, any account contains a user’s personal information, such as age, gender, place of residence and education. It should be noted that the analysis of social media data has some bias since not all users honestly specify their personal information. However, despite some “noise” affecting the quality of the sociolinguistic data, we assume that most of the data is valid considering its quantity and allows correlating text and social characteristics. In this chapter we would like to make an emphasis on the age characteristics, implement data analytics and describe typical features for identified age groups.