LEXICAL FEATURES OF ANTI-LANGUAGE IN THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ALTERNATIVE SPEECH BEHAVIOUR (ON THE INTERNET MEMES)

The article discusses the study of the language items of the English alternative speech behavior in the accompanying texts of the Internet memes. The necessity of studying the language of the Internet communities viewed as a special social form of anti-language and defined through the notion of alternative anti-society is a result of the emergence of network subculture expressing and building the subjective reality. The paper aims to explore and analyze the basic features of anti-language, to identify and categorize its characteristic markers on the lexical basis. The article presents the analysis and systematization of the specific markers of the Internet slang according to their thematic and functional features in the Internet memes viewed as viral Internet signs distributed from one Internet user to the other, a kind of precedent phenomena maintaining the information about some certain cultural or political event which served as sources for their emergence. It is identified that the typical markers of alternative speech behaviour are abbreviations and acronyms in the memes of social issues and colloquial vocabulary in the memes of political issues. The frequent usage of abbreviations and slang-forms in the Internet memes which are mostly decoded by lingua-cultural knowledge is due to the principles of informality, speech economy, spontaneity and linguistic creativity which are the typical features if the Internet communication. The study of the Internet language of alternative social groups allows to enlarge the knowledge of the net slang as a typical example of linguistic revolution which develops the structure and functions of the Internet communication