Means of Expressing the Idea of Real and Virtual Space in the Internet News Discourse

The article attempts to explore the linguistic means used to express the idea of real and virtual space in the Internet news discourse, to identify means capable of simultaneously representing the meaning of real and virtual space, to determine their connection with primary meanings and etymological nature. At the linguistic level, the authors treat the category of space (following A. V. Bondarko) as a functional-semantic category of locativity. The study employed the methods of linguistic observation and description, functional-semantic analysis, analysis of dictionary definitions, seme analysis, and etymological analysis. On the material of Internet news portals of the Amur region, the main means of expressing the category of locativity have been established. The following have been identified as representatives of the semantics of real space in Internet news texts: nouns of various lexico-semantic types (names of individual spaces, spatial concretizers of events, spatial metalexics, parametric lexicon, demonyms); adjectives that realize spatial meaning indirectly, through the spatial semantics of the nouns from which they are formed. The main means of expressing the meaning of virtual space in the Internet news discourse are nouns that name network resources, their elements, and specific Internet spaces. The specific means of representation of the semantic category of locativity in Internet media texts are neological units expressing the meaning of virtual space: the adjectives instagramny* and telegramny, formed from the names of the corresponding Internet spaces, as well as the verbs zapostit’ and repostit’ (to post and repost), the spatial meaning of which is embedded in their semantic structure. In addition, the Internet news discourse contains lexemes that, depending on the environment, can represent the meanings of both real and virtual space. The figurative meaning of these units have been formed through lexical transposition under the influence of semantic calquing.