MULTIMODAL CHARACTERISTICS OF TWEETS REGARDING THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR ON THE CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL NETWORK TWITTER

Abstract

Modern social networks are the main means of communication in the modern world, characterized by a peculiarity in language design: people mostly use a minimal amount of text, using other semiotic signs such as emoticons or images. Twitter users actively express their thoughts and feelings on the social network through various multimodal means. Since the beginning of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, the topic of the Russian-Ukrainian war has become the main topic of posts on social media. On Twitter, emphasizing their national identity, defiance, and indomitability, people began to spread tweets with semiotic signs: linguistic, audio, and visual. Such tweets have become a short but multicomponent text – a multimodal text that appeals to different receptors of the recipient so that he or she can fully perceive the text and understand its meaning and purpose. Thus, multimodal texts on social media have become a new and relevant field of research. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze multimodal semiotic means for the representation of the Russian- Ukrainian war on the social network Twitter. The article analyzes the multimodal features of the Russian-Ukrainian war in the social network Twitter, which are realized using various semiotic signs. Examples of partial and full multimodality of the text about the Russian-Ukrainian war are studied and presented. The place and significance of multimodal metaphors in tweets about the Russian-Ukrainian war are determined. The article highlights examples of semiotic images of the Russian- Ukrainian war. Examples of tweets that demonstrate the full multimodality of the text about the Russian-Ukrainian war are analyzed. Given the events taking place in the country, Twitter has become a real communication “battlefield”. The studied tweets reflect the peculiarities of the interaction of semiotic signs, including hashtags, emojis, links to primary sources, and musical inserts. All these multimodal elements do not just exist in a tweet, but are interconnected, forming such a tweet as a single and multicomponent text that influences the public consciousness.