MULTIMEDIA LANGUAGE CODE AND ITS ROLE IN POLITICAL LINGUISTICS
The development of Internet technologies and multimedia makes it possible to create texts incorporating signs of various codes, both verbal and nonverbal, alphabetical and non - alphabetical. This allows posing a hypothesis about the formation of a new multimedia language code in the communicative space of the Internet. This code is considered to be a logical stage in the development of human communication under new technological conditions but not as an anthropological regression. The multimedia code complicates the traditional punctuation system of language integrating into it emoji, stickers and other multimedia signs in the function of commas, full stops, suspension points, etc. Multimedia stylistics treats the new communicative language code as a potential for boosting emotionality and expressiveness. The author discriminates between the terms “multimedia text” and “multimodal text”: the multimedia text emerges on the basis of multimedia and is a product of multimedia technologies which form a complex syncretic code of media communication by incorporating signs of diversified media nature, and the multimodal text is not necessarily media. Multimedia texts, which are at the same time polycode and multimodal, produce a stimulating effect with a serious impact upon the recipient. This property of multimedia texts is actively used in political communication. Internet memes and multimedia articles which become instruments of modern political technologies are especially interesting for political linguistics. The meme, genetically connected with cartoon, is not created by artists but by any common person who has mastered multimedia Internet technologies. The advantages of the meme consist in the speed of disseminating, a wide range of audience (it is close to political anecdote in this sense) and the interactive response to a political message. The multimedia code in the Internet articles does not only enhance the perception by all sense organs but also improves information reliability, e.g. by using video footages.