Cutting Hedges in Electronic Communication: a Study of the Contemporary English of Blogs

Abstract

The purpose of the work is to determine the ways of development of transformational processes characteristic of online communication in social networks, blogs and game platforms, which in particular involves lexical-semantic, structural linguopragmatic and syntactic analysis of network slang with reference to the socio-cultural aspect. To achieve the goal, the following tasks were set: 1) to develop the theoretical and methodological foundations of the study of slang units that function within the most popular Internet platforms for communication; 2) identify and systematize the most common means and models of creating units of network slang; 3) to analyze the peculiarities of the functioning of English netspeak; 4) to develop a methodological algorithm for the study of structural and functional characteristics of network slang; 5) to systematize transformational and deviant processes characteristic of online communication at all organizational levels, in particular, morphological, syntactic and textual; 6) to analyze the process of transformation of established cultural realities of cyberspace players; 7) highlight the linguo-pragmatic features of the functioning of slangisms in the English-language network discourse; 8) to determine the causes and perspectives of the influence of the popularization of the slang language of Internet users on the culture of Ukraine and English-speaking countries.