RITUAL SPEECH GENRES ON SOCIAL NETWORKS (ON THE MATERIAL OF MESSAGES ON UKRAINIAN AND AMERICAN TWITTER)

Abstract

The article deals with the study of ritual speech genres in Ukrainian and American network discourses. The concept of speech genre is defined and tweet is characterized as a specific genre of network discourse. The research focuses on the implementation of traditional ritual genres within the framework of new genre of virtual communication on the social network Twitter. It involves the presentation and information exchange in the form of a short message – a tweet. Tweets in Ukrainian and American network discourse were compared, and it allowed not only to determine the general genre features of texts, but also to trace the differences in the representation of ritual genres on social networks of multilingual discourses. The purpose of the article is to identify the linguistic specifics of the implementation of ritual genres on the social network Twitter, which led to the solution of the following tasks: to define the concept of the speech genre; characterize the genre “tweet” and trace the specifics of its functioning in the Ukrainian and American Twitter; identify the main rituals speech genres represented in network communication; to find out the specifics of ritual genres on the social network Twitter and develop their typology. The object of the research was the network discourse presented on the Ukrainian and American Twitter, and the subject of the research was a tweet, which is a representant of ritual speech genres. A typology of ritual genres of network communication was developed, in particular, the genres of greetings, gratitudes, wishes and necrologies, which perform both informational and etiquette functions of communication, were analyzed. Common and distinctive features of communicative behavior of tweet authors in the Ukrainian and American network space were described. The research was based on the articles of wellknown Ukrainian and American politicians, writers, journalists and bloggers.