Word Play in Modern Russian Network Discourse

The phenomenon of the word play is studied in this work on the basis of the network discourse reflected in the materials of the Russian competition “Word of the Year” for 2007-2021. The participants of this contest were subject to sociolinguistic analysis – words, expressions, and phrases that are products of a word play. All of them, as it turned out, were included in the nomination “Neologism of the Year”. The empirical analysis was subordinated to the goal of determining their functionality and identifying the underlying word-formation models and techniques of lexical implementation of the latter. The results of the study indicate the active appeal of users of social networks to the word play in two situations. Firstly, when a communicator wants to express one’s disagreement, a critical attitude towards real events. Then s/he usually resorts to ridicule as a form of word play, functionally aimed at lowering evaluative meanings (a case of “corrective humor”). Secondly, in a situation of counteracting psychological tension and stress caused by a traumatic event, when using a joke, the communicator seeks to reduce emotional tension—his/her own and / or the audience (a case of “benevolent humor”). In both situations, as the analysis showed, the same set of word-formation models of the Russian language and word play techniques are used. To create new lexical units, paronymic attraction and contamination are most widely used. These models are adjoined by prefixation, suffixation, their combination, as well as other traditional Russian language models for generating lexical units. Among the techniques of the word play that provide a laughing reaction, deceived expectation, logical inconsistency and playing with set expressions stand out. In general, the results of the study indicate that the word play remains a popular means of achieving the comic effect desired by the communicator, not only by journalists, as noted by analysts of modern Russian public discourse, but also by ordinary users of social networks in their everyday speech communication.