Лингвистические особенности английского языка в интернете на примере твиттера

УДК 338.46

ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКИЕ ОСОБЕННОСТИ АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА В ИНТЕРНЕТЕ НА ПРИМЕРЕ ТВИТТЕРА

Маратканова Н.С., студент, Орлова А.Е., доц.

Чувашский государственный аграрный университет

Краткая аннотация: Статья посвящена описанию лингвистических особенностей микроблоггинга носителей английского языка в Твиттере. Произведен анализ наиболее часто употребляемых лексических образований в языке.

Ключевые слова: Твиттер, язык, коммуникация, твиты, английский, альтернативное речевое поведение.

LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ON THE INTERNET ON THE EXAMPLE OF TWITTER

Maratkanova N.S., student, Orlova A.E. docent,

Chuvash State Agrarian University

Brief summary: Article is devoted to the description of linguistic features of English native speakers microblogging in Twitter. The analysis performed of the most frequent used lexical formations in the language.

Keywords: Twitter, language, communication, tweets, English, alternative speech behavior.

The Internet gives us lots of opportunities for communication, development and learning in the modern world. Social networks broaden minds by letting in loads of interesting persons in our lives. Sometimes a new friend doesn't speak your native language. This mostly becomes a motivation to learn English. The Internet rallies people from different countries and English stays a universal language for everyone's communication. Texts on the Internet differ by deep genre variety what influence on practice of using language and making specific vocabulary. One of the most popular genres of internet communication is microblogging nowadays.

Since its inception in 2006, Twitter has built a reputation of leading micro-blogging platform all over the world for itself. Its wide spread and integration with other parts of the digital media ecosystem caused public debates, pop-culture responses and academic researches.

Twitter is an internet communication technology which allows users to send short messages - tweets - in 280 symbols long. Twitter is characterized by availability and ease of content publishing, relative simplicity of search and indexing information, interaction with society and contagiousness. For the last 8 years popularity of Twitter was growing fast paced. Nowadays about 500 million entries are published daily on Twitter and most of them are in English.

It is important and necessary to talk about existing alternative speech behavior in microblogging messages of Twitter today. Alternative English speech behavior is a language of internet societies formed by the base of social networks where internet messages are the main units of information. They express private, social and political opinions of participants of virtual communication. This language doesn't show a holistic communicative system but has the vocabulary and grammar of a national language. Usually it is called jargon or slang.

David Crystal tried to classify tweets by content. So, by analyzing 2000 tweets during 10 days it was found out that 40% of tweets was pointless babble, 37% was conversations about life's issues, 9% of messages are retweets to pass along value, 6% was self-promotion and 4% was news coverage and spam.

Main features of internet slang in Twitter microblogging are dynamism, language saving, increased emotionality and high level of talkativeness, familiarity and non-normative.

Mostly Twitter users write in real tense using only Simple group even if it’s grammatically wrong. Often group of Perfect tenses replaced by Past Simple. Using the Simple tense group is a characteristic feature for Twitter.

Also there is a tendency to use some wrong grammar forms of comparison of adjectives. That means that users don’t pay attention to using right forms and replace traits characterised for speaking into writing.

Detailed analysis of the lexical characteristics of English Twitter messages revealed that initial conciseness of tweets make authors actively searching and using different ways of language economy. So the most popular in English tweets are abbreviations made by reduction of one word or phrase, for example:

• DM = direct message (DM me = write me in direct message);
• GMTA = great minds think alike (GMTA, I thought exactly the same thing).

As frequent as the first are acronyms formed by reduction of initial sound of word or phrase pronounced together. For example:

• GOAT =greatest of all time (I'm the GOAT = I'm the best on this planet);
• ROFL = Rolling on floor laughing.

Limit and pithiness of communication in tweets has become the reason for the appearance of special literal writing words and acronyms. That forced to create specialized Twitter dictionaries. For example one of the most popular editions "Twittonary" has explanations and interpretations of plenty words connected with Twitter. (ab/abt = about; glhf = good luck have fun; lmk = let me know; wzup = what's up; TY = thank you; guvy = something that is more than just insane, close to godlike).

Twitter counts impressive amount of words innovations, motivated by the name of the platform itself:

• Actwivist = activist + Twitter (a person using Twitter to defend his political, social or other position);
• Attwaction = Twitter + attraction (feeling interested to other Twitter user);
• Atwention = attention + Twitter (availability, readiness to direct conversation by using Twitter etc).

 To make tweets more emotional and to save symbols authors are using blending - technique of word formation that combines two words in a new one and saves both lexical meanings. For example: Suh, Dude = Sup (What's up reduction) + huh; I was friendscaping = cleaning friend's list.

Spontaneous and laid-back conversations style of Twitter users explain theirs often using colloquial and slang expressions, emotionally and expressive colored lexical spoken words, lowered and obscene lexicon.