Fictional text as a basis for the Internet meme: Based on the study of modern receptions

The subject of this paper is Internet memes containing winged units (winged words) in the verbal part and functioning in the Russian and French Internet segments with their source being a fictional text. When developing the research concept, the consideration was given to the works in the field of Internet communication (I.V. Bugaeva, S.V. Kanashina, M.A. Krongauz), krylatology (winged words theory) (A.S. Makarov, V.M. Shulezhkova), text linguistics (S. Bolotova, V.E. Chernyavskaya). The research methods included the descriptive-analytical method providing a direct study of the phenomena to be analyzed, systematization and generalization of the language material, as well as definitional, discursive methods; methods of continuous sampling and of cultural background interpretation. The study is based on the authors' card index with about 1500 different forms of Internet memes (more than 1000 extracted from Runet, 500 from the French segment of the Internet), this paper describes 16 examples. The analyzed units of the verbal part were winged units from the works of Russian (Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Tyutchev) and French (Francois Rabelais, Paul Verlaine, Antoine de Saint-Exupery) authors. Verification of the material was based on the Large Dictionary of Winged Words and Expressions of the Russian Language by V.P. Berkov, V.M. Mokienko, S.G. Shulezhkova (2009). The following winged units used as the verbal part of Internet memes were analyzed: Tolstoy's Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house; Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way and Everything will work out all right; Tyutchev's Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone; Rabelais's L’appelil vient en mangeant; de Saint-Exupery's S'aimer c'est regarder ensemble dans la meme direction; Verlaine's Les sanglots longs / des violons / / de l'automne // blessent mon coeur // d'une langueur // monotone. The comparative analysis of the Internet memes operating in the Russian and French segments has shown asymmetry. In quantitative terms, Runet contains a larger number of winged words (WW) that appeared in fictional texts, which reflects the popularity and demand for WWs in general, the knowledge of fictional texts in particular, and the use of the expressive potential of the winged words corpus. The French segment of the Internet has single examples of the WWs in the Internet memes for WWs are less popular in French with its desire for allusion reaching the highest degree of abstraction when the connection with the image is lost. The authors use the functional potential of the WWs: in both Russian and French Internet memes WWs are used in a transformed shape, which allows speaking

Keywords

Authors

References