Linguistic peculiarities of text component of the creolized Internet memes

Abstract

The object of this research is the text component of Internet meme as a signifier of special type. The subject of this research is the peculiarities of text captions to the images posted in the Russian-speaking and English-speaking segments of the Internet. The authors dwell on such aspects as the syntactic, theme-rhematic, and orthographic peculiarities of the text component of Internet memes. Special attention is given to the problem of intentional misspellings in text captions. In most cases, namely the text actualizes the image; the memes usually involve film stills, drawings, and photo images, and text captions turn these images into the relevant Internet memes. The main conclusions lies in determination of the peculiarities of the text part of creolized Internet memes on all linguistic levels. Due to the specificities of Internet memes, the texts usually represent short sentences. The syntactic structure of used phrases often resembles a marked construction, and in a number of instances with intentional misspellings. The novelty of this research lies in the analysis of Internet memes from the perspective of linguistics. Although there are Russian and foreign research dedicated to semiotic and communicative components of the Internet memes, as well as their evolution and transformations, the analysis of linguistic component is carried out for the first time.