LINGUOSEMIOTIC FEATURES OF TWITTER MICROBLOGGING

Virtual reality has changed our perception of communication dramatically. Virtual communication creates a special reality with the presence effect. The text becomes a multidimensional concept produced by the language personality of the collective author. Virtual communication is characterised by a variety of genres. Microblogging is a combination of blogging and instant messaging that allows users to create short messages to be posted and shared with an audience online. Social platforms like Twitter have become extremely popular forms of this new type of blogging, especially on the mobile web - making it much more convenient to communicate with people. Our research is devoted to the study of Twitter microblogging as one of the leading genres of virtual communication and to the analysis of the linguistic and semiotic peculiarities of the microblog's language. The main discursive practices of microblogging are: information segmentation, compression, in-text polytextuality, hypertextuality, creolization, the use of multimedia. Currently the blog format has changed significantly. From being personality-oriented it is being transformed into semi-thematic columns comprising new types, thus the focus shifts to an impersonal interlocutor. The most striking feature of Twitter is the speed of communication which requires quick and spontaneous feedbacks and concise and succinct nature of messages. These factors spark the prevalence of the main discursive practice of compression. Compression takes place on all the linguistic levels. Semiotic variation shows that elements of different sign systems simultaneously exist in the discourse of microblogging. (c) 2019 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.UK