Specific features of discursive space for birthday greetings in Facebook social network: ecolinguistic perspective

The paper deals with the establishment of a new ecological paradigm in linguistics, where language is viewed as an action aimed at achieving results in the future and proceeds in the interaction of an organism and the environment. Language is regarded as a complex activity (holistic approach). Cartesian dualism is shifted by the empirical language study in correlation with living organisms (biological systems). Verbal performance is considered to be a part of distributed human activity, coordination between the dynamic system or organism and environment. In general, Facebook posts are considered as an artificial symbolic niche, i.e. network of material structures for social interaction that comprises text messages, video, visual, or sound images put by users on their own or others’ pages aimed at coordinating actions and triggering changes. The author outlines some specific features of the Internet discourse while analyzing birthday greetings in the Facebook social network posted by Russian, American, French, and German users. Some of the features include reduced character of the message, the use of abbreviations, simple structures, merging and interaction of written and spoken languages, the use of graphical signs to convey emotions. Spoken-like text types mediated by Internet are recently of great interest for linguists. The abovementioned social network is used as some environment for extended, distributed, and diverse ecology with definite culturally oriented values.