Creative Opportunities of the Language in Online Communication

The paper reports the findings of the study of the implementation of the creative function of language in Internet communication. This research perspective allows to consistently describe the functioning of language online and to explain the visible and controversially viewed by academics (as innovative or as destructive) processes in the language system, occurring under the influence of the Internet environment. The revision of traditional standards of communication when communicating via Internet occurs, first of all, due to extralinguistic factors (primarily, digital transformation) and, secondly, due to the Internet interlocutors’ (both the speaker and the listener) attitude towards creative use of the language. The new extralinguistic conditions of language (multimedia, non-linear nature, its modules, hypertextuality, etc.) primarily release its creative potential as the novelty is inherently creative and requires the updating of traditional, familiar, and already studied forms of communication. The influence of the creative function of the language can be traced both at the micro levels of the language system (especially at the phonetic and lexical levels) and at the macro level of the whole text (the emergence of new genres). At the phonetic level, influenced by the creative function, the language of the Internet acquires a special spoken-written character. Moreover, the imitation of orality in Internet communication is aimed not only at achieving maximum similarity of online communication to offline conversation, but also at the language play, emotionalism, updating the graphic code with emoji (for example, the use of emoji as ending punctuation marks, i.e., instead of period, exclamation mark, etc.). At the lexical level, the creative function of the language is evident in the emergence of proper Russian neologisms and borrowings for more accurate, sometimes more succinct denotation of the new reality. At the textual level, the study, e.g., of the model Internet genre of multimedia history, the identification of its special narrative structure and the multimedia nature of presenting the information suggests the creative potential of new genres in the online communication.