SEMIOTICS OF MODERN INTERNET COMMUNICATION

Abstract

This article examines the semiotic organization of contemporary Ukrainianlanguage Internet communication, focusing on the interaction of verbal, visual, graphic, and platform-specific resources in the construction of meaning within digital discourse. The study is grounded in the principles of social semiotics and multimodality, treating online communication as an integrated semiotic system rather than a sequence of isolated linguistic units. Particular attention is paid to emojis, non-numeric use of digits, graphiclexical hybrids, playful phonetic spelling, English borrowings, digital slang, abbreviations, punctuation variation, and meme-based communication as interconnected components of contemporary digital semiosis. The empirical material consists of a corpus of 360 publicly available Ukrainian-language digital communication units collected from Telegram, Instagram, X, and Facebook between January 2024 and March 2025. The research employs multimodal semiotic analysis, discourse analysis, pragmatic analysis, and contextual interpretation to identify the communicative functions of different semiotic resources and the principles governing their interaction within authentic digital environments. The findings demonstrate that meaning in contemporary Ukrainian online communication is rarely generated by verbal language alone. Instead, communicative interpretation emerges through the coordinated interaction of linguistic, visual, graphic, and interface-based signs. Emojis function not merely as emotional markers but as pragmatic devices that modify illocutionary force and regulate interpretation. Graphic transformations, playful orthography, English lexical borrowings, digital abbreviations, and punctuation deviations perform important identity-building, expressive, and interpersonal functions rather than representing departures from linguistic competence. Meme-based communication operates as an efficient mechanism of semantic compression, activating shared cultural knowledge and facilitating rapid meaning construction within online communities. The analysis further indicates that the semiotic organization of Ukrainian digital discourse reflects broader cognitive transformations associated with multimodal information processing and clip-like perception, where different communicative modes are interpreted simultaneously rather than sequentially. The study contributes to contemporary research in social semiotics, digital discourse studies, and multimodal linguistics by providing an integrated description of the mechanisms through which meaning is distributed across multiple semiotic layers in Ukrainian-language Internet communication. It also expands current understanding of how digital environments reshape communicative practices without undermining the adaptive potential of the Ukrainian language.