PRAGMATIC ROLE OF CREATIVE AD-HOC UNITS IN SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT MAKING

Abstract

Recently influencers promote both their online personas and certain products through microblogging. Hence, the article highlights the tactics of self-branding being the key communicative strategy behind each creative ad-hoc coinage on Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter. Firstly, the author gives an insight into the social media functioning and its pervasiveness around the globe. Further on, the author proposes her own classification of functions of ad-hoc units in microblogging. Based on the scientific literature analysis, we can argue that the functions of the occasional words are likely to fall into common (nominative, textual-stylistic/creative, expressive-evaluative and text-forming), and metacommunicative, predetermined by a number of extralinguistic factors. The study findings prove that influencers and bloggers make use of lexical creativity to attract attention to their posts, to humorously reinterpret the events of extralinguistic reality, and promote a product they are explicitly or implicitly advertising. Through the prism of pragmatics, ad-hoc units on social networks function to promote and sell a product and are often employed by social media managers. Another reason is the desire for self-branding and creation of the so-called commodified persona that helps social media influencers self-express and attract new followers and subscribers. From the pragmatic perspective, ad-hoc units in social networks predominantly serve as markers of the strategy of self-branding, realised by the communicative tactic of evoking associations, communicative tactic of appealing to emotions, the tactic of epatage, and the tactic of bonding in order to reframe the situation. Hence, the importance of social networks, particularly Twitter, Pininterest and Instagram is growing not only for entertaining purposes, but for social media marketing (self-presentation and branding), due to which influencers and social media managers use various linguistic means to attract attention either to themselves, or to the product they are promoting