Structural and Semantic Features of Abbreviations on the Social Networking Site Twitter

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the structural and semantic features of abbreviations in the social network Twitter. The study of the phenomenon of language compression picked linguistic interest of many researchers due to the intensive use of the World Wide Web. The basic principles and concepts of the «new linguistic environment», which have their own linguistic laws, are considered. The article analyzes common wordformation models in writing tweets (short messages on the network), among which the most productive are abbreviations of phrases, acronyms, abbreviations and graphic abbreviations. An empirical corpus analysis of the study suggests that the use of abbreviations on Twitter is extremely common. This leads to the fact that a significant number of messages require a certain decoding, and their interpretation becomes impossible without the appropriate knowledge of abbreviations and acronyms, which have become integral elements of the paradigm of intercultural communication for millions of users around the world.