Analysis of the illocutionary functions of utterances on the example of tweets

The study focuses on the psychology of personality in a virtual reality. The central subject of virtual psychology includes such characteristics of a person, which would help in the creation of his psychological profile. We are interested in not only the personality psychology on the Internet, but its expression using linguistic means in speech. It is effective to treat this problem through the prism of illocutionary functions of Russian verbs. The illocutionary functions of utterances appearing on Twitter are discussed in the article. It also describes an experiment to identify the illocutionary functions of tweets. The studies were conducted on the corpus of tweets containing about 8000 messages of Russian-speaking users. It was possible to separate these posts on 17 categories according to the illocutionary acts. For each category a set of characteristic features was defined. The vast majority of tweets in the analyzed collection are classified as narrative. A large number of congratulations indicate the propensity of people to observe traditions and the desire to share positive emotions. It is, indeed, one of the most popular trends on Twitter - to write congratulations. Basically they are not addressed to any particular reader, but everyone in general. Estimates and opinions are also represented among the tweets in a relatively large amount, because people share not only objective information and facts, but also publish subjective judgments, evaluate and analyze events. Empathy is a sign of the emotional response of the people, their emotional cohesion. Illocutionary function of this category can be compared with the function of the suggestions/motives with the difference that the latter is expressed by the enthusiasm and commitment of the speaker to the real action. A large number of suggestions/motives are a sign of a large number of enterprising people among users. Gratitude category contains statements that are reactions to the congratulations, wishes, empathy. It is natural to assume that the number of tweets containing illocutionary function of gratitude will be somewhat close to the sum of the quantitative characteristics of these three categories. However, it turned out that it is not so. According to the results, gratitude category provides by an order fewer tweets than we expected. Ongoing studies are useful not only for Twitter, but also for any social network. Determination of formal criteria in this problem allows taking a fresh look at the semantic and pragmatic component for automatic analysis of text information. The research results are useful in the creation of a psychological profile of users, in detection, modeling and prediction of behavioral and response patterns of different types of people.

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