Demotivational poster as a type of online creative work

The article reviews demotivational posters as a type of lingual personality’s online creative work analyzing them as a type of creolised texts and classifying according to the relations between the verbal and the iconic parts. Demotivational poster is understood as a combination of a picture in a black frame and two kinds of a text typed in a white colour to comment on the used picture. The relations between the verbal and the iconic parts are subdivided into autosemantic and synsemantic. Autosemantic relations are typical of the texts with partial creolisation. In such texts the iconic component is optional for the right understanding of the verbal one. Synsemantic relations are a characteristic of the texts with full creolisation. In such texts the verbal component cannot be understood without the icon component properly. The article also touches upon the functions of demotivational posters, and the aims of the participants of the Internet communication pursued in the process of using and creating demotivational posters. The participants of the Internet communication, who employ ready-made demotivational posters, use them in their communicative, emotional-expressive and voluntative functions. The participants of the Internet communication, who create demotivational posters, construct them actualising their communicative, emotional-expressive, voluntative, cognitive and ideological functions.