Verbal Self-Representation of German-Speaking Influencers in Instagram

Abstract

The article covers the features of verbal self-presentation in the German-speaking segment of the Instagram Internet service. The study focuses on the virtual personality of influencers from Germany, who through blogging gain popularity among a large audience of users and achieve commercial benefits. The relevance of the work is predetermined by the anthropocentric paradigm of modern linguistics and the unflagging attention of philologists to the issues of Internet communication. The novelty is seen in the fact that for the first time an attempt is made to comprehensively consider verbal methods and means of self-presentation in the Instagram environment. The linguistic analysis of self-positioning of a special category of virtual communicants-influencers, which has no analogues in modern linguistics, is proposed. The author distinguishes four ways of verbal self-presentation in Instagram: self-nomination (user name and account name), self-description, caption for a photo or video, comment. The use of each method for the construction of a virtual image of the blogger is characterized separately. It is noted that all components of self-presentation of influencers demonstrate certain trends in the use of language tools. The structural, lexical, thematic, graphical specificity of the self-presentational ways is describes. The results of quantitative analysis of the vocabular diversity and readability of the texts produced by the influencers performed with the help of special software are presented.

Keywords

• self-presentation
• influencer
• self-nomination
• self-description
• caption
• comment
• internet
• blogger
• instagram