Linguistic and stylistic characteristics of the communicative genre of rumors on the internet (a case study of rumors about the British royal family in English-language microblogs)

The aim of the study is to identify the lexico-stylistic characteristics of unverified information in a modern English-language internet genre – the microblog – which contributes to revealing the features of modern internet communication. The article is devoted to such a multifaceted phenomenon of modern communication as rumors, the study of which allows us to reveal and analyze new patterns of linguistic behavior in a dynamic information environment. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that, for the first time in Russian linguistics, linguistic-stylistic heterogeneity has been established as a key characteristic of the organization of unverified information in the digital microblogging space, based on English-language posts about the life of the British royal family. As a result, the latest characteristics of the communicative genre of rumors in the blogosphere were determined at the phonetic-graphic, lexical, morphological-syntactic, and stylistic levels of the language system, including those determined by the communicative-pragmatic factor, as well as their genre variability. The author substantiates the importance of taking into account the constant transformation of unverified information in the further development of rumurology as a scientific discipline.