Genres of New Media in Linguistic Expertise Practices

Abstract

The article addresses the debatable points of research into present-day media genres: memes, surveys, comments, social network posts, etc. that become the materials for forensic linguistic expertise. The issue of identifying the object of linguistic expertise of information materials is discussed. The ways the new discursive reality transforms the existing methodological approaches are conceptualized. The brevity of the texts under examination, the dependence on the sociocultural context and the communicative situation, the presence of hypertext determine the complexity of the expert assessment of new media materials. The cases of ambiguous interpretation of brief comments and the peculiarities of defining the subject of speech in them are dealt with in the article. Special attention is paid to the techniques of play on words (pun) and irony as well as the linguistic semiotic analysis of creolized texts. The problem areas of expert research into new media materials included in the space of social communications are characterized. Special attention is paid to the problem of multi-discipline expertise, since the specificity of the material under study and the tasks to be solved determine the involvement of specialists of the socio-humanistic profile (psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, religious scholars, etc.) and necessitate solving the issue of the boundaries of experts’ competence. The new discursive reality associated with the involvement of mass audience in the production of media content suggests some changes in approaches to the linguistic expert assessment of the materials under scrutiny.

Keywords

• forensic linguistic expertise
• multi-discipline expertise
• media genres
• discourse
• polycode text