Speech Missteps in Internet Communication

The article discusses speech missteps, i.e. errors which a speaker (the one who speaks) or a writer (the one who writes) makes accidentally. One can also do speech missteps if s/he is not good enough in standard Russian. Speech missteps are registered in online communication, and later they can be replicated in different texts. They also can become Internet memes, and/or be used as a kind of a stylistic mark. The aim of the article is to examine some speech missteps and metatextual reactions to them to analyse the way speech missteps function in modern Internet communication. The article considers works in the field of speech errors, namely, in Russian ontolinguistics (S.N. Tseytlin, B.I. Kapinos, M.R. Lvov), Russian stylistics (A.P. Skovorodnikov, A.V. Barinova), grammar of errors (Grammaire des Fautes by H. Frei), corpora of errors (E.V. Rakhilina), erratology (A.B. Shevnin), psycholinguistics (A.A. Zalevskaya), cognitive linguistics (M.V. Rusakova, O.V. Kukushkina). The research methodology was based on discourse analysis, since it combines the analysis of language with the discussion of sociocultural strategies. The article considers speech missteps in Internet communication both as a linguistic and as a sociocultural phenomenon. As a linguistic phenomenon, speech missteps have a tendency to penetrate into common usage and to become standardized. When one uses a well-known speech misstep deliberately, it helps him/her to create expressive and ironic utterances. As a sociocultural phenomenon, speech missteps produce metatex-tual reactions from participants of online communication. Metatextual reactions to speech missteps transfer communication from the discussion of "what-one-speaks-about" to the discussion of "how-one-speaks". This is a significant feature of modern speech communication. Speech missteps also initiate narratives about the Russian language (its corruption and debasement; the general deterioration of literacy in Russia; funny mistakes in Russian, etc.). The material under analysis is examples of speech missteps which the author collected herself (more than two hundred examples). She also took into account lists of missteps published on Internet sites AdMe.ru, fishki.net, orfosvinstvo (https://vk.com/orfosvinstvo), menya ukusil filolog (https://vk.com/ukusfilologa) etc. Thus, there were approximately 600 units under consideration. More than 30 examples illustrate the main points of the article. The author examined: (a) speech missteps and metatextual reactions to them extracted from a range of comments to articles on colta.ru, an online media outlet; (b) collections of speech missteps published on the Internet sites; (c) blogs in which speech missteps were used to create an ironic effect; (d) a collection of chernomyrdinki (Chernomyrdin's idioms), i.e. spontaneous public statements of Viktor Chernomyrdin, one of the key figures in Russian politics in the 1990s. Chernomyrdin's idioms came to be Internet memes. Now they are considered as units of Russian lexicon. They illustrate how speech missteps enter common usage and become standardized. The results of the study can motivate a further research on the role and function of speech missteps in Internet communication, since they are included in the active processes in modern Russian.

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