Morphological analysis of the lexicon used in the Russian social network "Vkontakte"

This paper investigates the inflectional and derivational processes typical for the language used in the Russian social network "Vkontakte." The paper provides qualitative analysis of the collected data from the above-mentioned web-site within the lexeme-based approach to morphology. The research was aimed to find the morphological processes, popular among "Vkontakte" users and to see if there are any new derivational processes, not typical for Russian. In the collected data, I single out onomatopoeia, borrowing and borrowed acronyms, semantic change, and morphological derivation that includes affixation, de-affixation, truncation, compounding, and clipped-compounding. These processes are typical for the Russian language in general and were previously described by Lopatin (1973), Cubberley (2002), Ryazanova-Clarke and Wade (1999), and Zemskaia (1992). The data include examples of non-typical for Russian derivation processes, like reduplication, blending, and metathesis. The inflectional processes follow the rules of the Russian language except for occasional use of the non-standard conjugation of verbs. Both inflectional and derivational processes are used to make the language more expressive and to emphasize certain ideas that the users share in the network. Adapted from the source document