SLANGISMS OF COVID-19 PHENOMENA IN ENGLISH INTERNET DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article focuses on the problem of structural and semantic peculiarities of COVID-19 slangisms in English Internet discourse. The starting point of the study is the fact that Internet as a social and cultural phenomenon gave birth not only to an important dynamic virtual communicative environment, but also became an object of numerous scientific researches in the frame of a new linguistic branch ̶ Internet Linguistics. The article also deals with the main features of Internet discourse, such as: 1) electronic signal as a channel of communication; 2) virtuality; 3) distant in space and time; 4) dependence on technical means; 5) the highest level of penetration as the reader of Internet discourse can be anybody; 6) hypertext; 7) creolization; 8) the equal status of participants; 9) emotions and feelings transference with the help of special signs; 10) a combination of different discourse types; 11) special ethic rules. It’s proved that during the COVID-19 lockdown discursive parameters of virtual communication such as the channel of communication, the communicative goal, its time and place, the genre of discourse, the language and verbal representation have been transformed substantially. They have lost their exact boundaries and became ambivalent. The dominant stylistic feature of the Internet discourse are slangisms, a complex of special words or new meanings of already existed words, which are used by different social (professional, civil, age) groups of people for emotional coloring of new social phenomena. The obtained results indicate that according to their structure the analyzed slangisms are compound words formed by blending of two or more stems or clipping of two or more stems. They, as a rule, nominate new social events connected with the pandemic situation, new social groups of people, which appeared depending on their attitude towards COVID-19, new objects or psychological states during the COVID-19 lockdown.