Information on the thesis

The thesis deals with the slang neologisms of English-speaking segment of Twitter
and Facebook social networking services, their pragmatic, semantic and  morphological
features.
In  the  paper  the  vocabulary  expansion  of  modern  English  is  analyzed  through
morphological and semantic slang neologisms.  Morphological type of slang neologisms’
formation  include:  affixation,  compounding,  abbreviation  and  conversion.  New  affixal
units were grouped acoording to prefixal, suffixal and prefixal-suffixal innovations. More
specifically,  the  author  concentrates  on  the  suffixal  units  within  the  scope  of  part-of-
speech classification. The notion of combining form and its role in the formation of slang
neologisms оn social networking services was also looked into. The research reveals that
«selfie»  is  one  of  the  most  productive  slang  neologisms  on  Twitter  and  Facebook.  An
abbreviation  consists  of  lexical  and  graphical  slang  neologisms.  Lexical  ones  include
blends  and  graphical  innovations  consist  of  initialisms  and  contractions  (consonant
shortenings).  Semantic  change    is    presented  by  metaphor,  metonymy,  eponymy,
generalization and narrowing of the meaning.  Quantitative analysis on each way of word-
formation is also made.
The  research  reveals  that  slang  neologisms  of  Facebook  and  Twitter  social
networking sites  have significant pragmatic potential due to the components of semantic
structure, which include expressive, emotional and evaluative elements.
The  problem  of  classification  and  functioning  of  the  internet-memes  as  units  of
information  in  the  minds  of  users  of  Twitter  and  Facebook  social  networking  sites  has
been  looked  into  too.  Particular  attention  is  paid  to  the  analysis  of  Internet-memes’
structural organization. The characteristic features and functions are highlighted. The main
types of Internet memes оn the Twitter and Facebook social networking sites are detected
and  the factors of their emergence are analyzed.
The  main  thematic  groups  and  subgroups  of  neologisms  are  highlighted.  The
emotive-evaluative  component  in  the  structure  of  neologisms  in  the  relevant  thematic
groups is analyzed.  The expression of positive, neutral and negative emotional evaluation
of these  neologisms at the  word  and phrase level is  looked into,  the transformation of
these  types  of  evaluations  is  traced  back.  Examples  with  ironic,  dismissive  and  rude
meaning outnumber neutral ones and  positive emotional evaluation is even less common
than neutral. Quantitative calculations on each group are also made.
In the thesis the peculiarities of the word play realization on Twitter and Facebook
social networking sites аre looked into. Some ways of word play formation and structural
types of the innovations are considered. The use of these linguistic phenomena permits to
reveal and describe pragmatic and sociocultural factors in the internet-communication.
Keywords:  social  networking  service,  Twitter,  Facebook,  semantics,  pragmatics,
interenet-meme, word play, emotional evaluation.