Speech genre of wishes in youth Internet discourse: Innovations and linguistic creativity

This paper analyses the use of the wishing genre among Russian young people. One of the features of youth speech is a shift from stereotypes, searching for new creative ways of expressing various intentions, such as evaluation, compliment, congratulation and wishing. The purpose of the study is to analyze the texts of wishes from the point of manifesting the linguistic creativity of the addressers; to identify the means and ways of destroying stereotypes. The research material is youth wishes, predominantly students’ wishes (more than 700 text fragments). The analysis of the content of the wishing texts enabled the author to classify all wishes into stereotypical, individual and combined. Empirical material shows that in the communication of friends most wishes refer to individual ones (64%), whereas combined and stereotypical wishes make up 25% and 11%, respectively. The analysis of the texts of wishes identified the ways and means of demonstrating the linguistic creativity of the addressee. These ways and means include the tactics of compliment, appeal, advice, switching the addressee to a humorous tone and some other tactics that are not discussed in this paper. All of them allow to make wishes less stereotypical. The material showed that addressers in wishes aim to supplement the universal components of the wishes with individualized elements, including in the text the utilitarian details of the addressee’s life. Most often, wishes contain references to the addressee’s profession or hobbies. Linguistic creativity of the addressers is manifested at all linguistic levels. First of all, addressees actively use tropes, such as epithets, metaphors, and comparisons. Addressers look for unusual objects for comparison in the linguistic repertoires; they often use hyperbolization. At the level of word-formation, we observe the use of affixes with an augmentative meaning, diminutives (predominantly in wishes to female addressees); speech innovations and occasional word formation. In wishes of young people, a shift from stereotypes reflects in reduplicating letters and symbols, changing letter case, breaking words into syllables and placing a hyphen between syllables; using a wide range of emojis and stickers; playing with colorful highlighting. Precedent texts play an important role in moving away from stereotypes. The author concludes that all the considered methods and means of linguistic creativity that are regularly used by authors when creating wishes make it possible to enhance the expressiveness and impact degree of the texts. They function to avoid stereotypes, achieve a perlocutionary effect, and contribute to the self-presentation of the addresser.

Russian language, wish, linguistic creativity, Internet communication