Social Media Discourse As a New Form of Written Communication: Linguistic Aspect

The study’s relevance stems from the rapid development of digital technologies and social media, which are transforming modern written communication and creating new English linguistic practices. The spread of computer-mediated communication raises the question of whether English discourse in social networks (SMS) should be studied as a distinct object of linguistic research, with its own lexical, syntactic, pragmatic, and graphostylistic features. The purpose of the article is to identify the main linguistic features of English discourse in social networks (SMS) and assess their impact on the modification of modern written English. The research methodology is based on the analysis and synthesis of previous research, comparative and corpus analysis of authentic English messages, discourse analysis, pragmatic analysis, a descriptive approach, and a generalization method. The empirical basis of the study is a corpus of 15,000 authentic English-language posts and comments from X, Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook, quantitatively analyzed using Sketch Engine and AntConc, which showed that abbreviations and acronyms account for 18.4% of lexical units, elliptical constructions account for 12.7% of syntactic structures, and emojis are used in 43.2% of messages. The study finds that English SMS discourse is an independent form of written communication that combines traditional language norms with digital communication practices. The results also show a high level of neologisms, abbreviations, acronyms, elliptical constructions, emojis, hashtags, and graphic elements in message design that contribute to effective digital interaction and play important pragmatic roles. It has been shown that written English changes as lexical, syntactic, pragmatic, and multimodal elements are integrated. The results are practically significant for research in digital linguistics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics, as well as for teaching English as a foreign language and developing digital communicative competence.