NEW AFFIXES IN THE MODERN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE INTERNET DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of new affixal morphemes in the English-language Internet discourse. Internet discourse is considered by the authors as a wide communicative space of Internet users. Communication on the Internet is characterized by the use of a complex hybrid form of the English language, which is a mixture of elements of both natural language and other sign systems: mathematical symbols, emoticons, etc. A special marker of the language of representatives of different online communities is the use of new affixes that serve to form new words and word forms, allowing representatives of these communities to hide from third-party users or encrypt the issues they are discussing. In the work, the authors proposed the term “neoaffix” to define all recently appeared affixal morphemes that were not recorded in dictionaries, characterized the periods and sources of the appearance of new affixes, described their functions and semantic features.