Lexical ways of designating the Internet in modern Russian: semantics, pragmatics, spelling

The article focuses on the words that designate the Internet and its segments and discusses such problems as the process of assimilation of lexeme "интернет" in contemporary Russian language and its spelling variants, the reasons and mechanisms of appearance of its synonyms. Formal and cognitive adaptation of the anglicisms "internet", "web", "net" and stylistic peculiarities of word-formative and semantic derivatives that appeared on the base of Russian language are also discussed. Particular attention is paid to the tendency for some English-language stems to become affixoids in contemporary Russian. Modern explanatory dictionaries and corpus data were used as sources of linguistic information about the functioning of investigated lexemes ([https://ruscorpora.ru/], [http://www.webcorpora.ru]), data obtained by search by keywords was also analyzed. Descriptive method was used in the research. Identified designations of the Internet, as well as its segments, are analyzed in terms of their origin and semantics. Their stylistic features are also explained. The research’s scientific novelty lies in identifying for the first time a variety of lexemes designating the Internet and its segments. The article considers the process of adaptation of lexical units denoting the concept of "Internet", as well as the peculiarities of their functioning in contemporary Russian language. The reasons for the emergence of synonymic designations of the word "Internet" and their peculiarities are analysed. A number of studied nominations ("глубокий", "черный" vs. "поверхностный", "белый интернет") are not listed in modern explanatory dictionaries. The conducted analysis allowed us to draw the following conclusion: synonyms of the lexeme "интернет" that appeared in Russian language, on the one hand reflect the denotative significance of the realia called "Internet", its role in modern society, and on the other hand the synonyms demonstrated significant word-formation and cognitive potential of contemporary Russian language.