Internet communication

The article attempts to consider new forms of Internet communication in terms of their genre affiliation. The research is focused on memes and demotivators, which are widely spread on social networks, but not always differentiated by users. The authors of the article conducted an online survey in order to find out what users of social networks understand by a meme and a demotivator, for what purpose, in what situation and who they send them to, how they react when they receive them.

The article considers issues related to speech genres in the new global areas of communication, which, in the first place, includes the Internet. Taking into account the main parameters of structuring the genre space of network discourse (V. I. Karasik, E. I. Go­roshko), the author identifies and describes the genre characteristics of the social network Instagram, which is one of the most popular platforms for communi­cation, self-­presentation, promotion and sales.

The article deals with the status of the speech genres theory (SGT) and its contribution to the development of modern linguistics. In his polemical article Professor V. V. Dementyev argues that SGT is characterized by the wide range of research problems, a close connection with such academic domains as the theory of speech acts, colloquial studies, discourse analysis, linguistic personology and other areas that study a human and their language.