The new language of the Internet: sources and mechanisms for the emergence of new vocabulary

Abstract

The article analyzes some of the features of the new language — the language of virtual communication, which functions in colloquial discourse. The authors of the article made an attempt to identify the sources of the formation of the language of the virtual space, to determine the linguistic mechanisms that determine the lexical and grammatical changes in the language of "Newspeak". It was revealed that one of the most productive sources of new vocabulary and the rules for its functioning is the English language, therefore the authors of the article compared some linguistic processes occurring in English with the processes observed in the Russian-language segment of the spoken Internet discourse. In the course of the analysis of the empirical material, it was revealed that the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet is currently being actively replenished with borrowings from the English language, in particular, slang expressions from the IT sphere. The authors of the article came to the conviction that the process of replenishing the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet from the thesaurus of English slang is a global process, which is a kind of “linguistic feed” for the entire Russian-speaking colloquial Internet discourse. Moreover, the abundance of Anglicisms in the Russian language contributes to the activation of two important word-formation processes — errativization and Internet abbreviation. The first process is due to the gravitation of the language of network communication to change words according to the principle of a language game, in particular, to phonetic writing ("krasafcheg", "lead"). Note that the formation of errativs is fully characteristic of the English language, which, in turn, may indicate the process of errativization as a universal linguistic phenomenon. The second process of forming a new layer of Internet vocabulary can be considered abbreviation (including abbreviations and graphons). This word-formation process in Russian colloquial discourse is realized through colloquial abbreviations, especially of an occasional nature or created by tracing. We also noted the role of Russian syntactic derivation, which is similar to the English derivational model. The authors of the article also drew attention to the activation of the deverbatization process, which is similar in grammatical characteristics to the gerund in English. The authors of the work come to the conclusion that the activation of word-formation processes in the language of network communication is directly related, firstly, to the fact of constant reception of words from the English language, and secondly, to the process of the influence of language models of the English language on the word-formation system of the Russian language.