Kornienko A.V. Word Play in Modern Russian Network Discourse. Galactica Media: Journal of Media Studies. 2023. No. 4. Pp. 141-159.

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Abstract

The phenomenon of the word play is studied in this work on the basis of the network discoursereflected in the materials of the Russian competition “Word of the Year” for 2007-2021. The partici-pants of this contest were subject to sociolinguistic analysis – words, expressions, and phrases thatare products of a word play. All of them, as it turned out, were included in the nomination “Neologismof the Year”. The empirical analysis was subordinated to the goal of determining their functionalityand identifying the underlying word-formation models and techniques of lexical implementation ofthe latter. The results of the study indicate the active appeal of users of social networks to the wordplay in two situations. Firstly, when a communicator wants to express one’s disagreement, a criticalattitude towards real events. Then s/he usually resorts to ridicule as a form of word play, functionallyaimed at lowering evaluative meanings (a case of “corrective humor”). Secondly, in a situation of coun-teracting psychological tension and stress caused by a traumatic event, when using a joke,thecommunicator seeks to reduce emotional tension—his/her own and / or the audience (a case of“benevolent humor”). In both situations, as the analysis showed, the same set of word-formationmodels of the Russian language and word play techniques are used. To create new lexical units,paronymic attraction and contamination are most widely used. These models are adjoined by prefixa-tion, suffixation, their combination, as well as other traditional Russian language models for gener-ating lexical units. Among the techniques of the word play that provide a laughing reaction, deceivedexpectation, logical inconsistency and playing with set expressions stand out. In general, the resultsof the study indicate that the word play remains a popular means of achieving the comic effectdesired by the communicator, not only by journalists, as noted by analysts of modern Russian publicdiscourse, but also by ordinary users of social networks in their everyday speech communication.