PRAGMATIC AND AESTHETIC VALUE OF «MASS LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY»

This article discusses a common trend in linguistic creativity in modern Russian language and its widespread and common character determined by a number of linguistic and extra-linguistic reasons. The author highlights the linguistic creativity of the Internet, media texts, and commercial naming, analyzes specific lexical and grammatical creative linguistic mechanisms (potential derivation, actualized polysemy, graphic hybridization, etc.) as well as aesthetic and pragmatic value of «the widespread linguistic creativity». This term implies an ability of a native speaker of Russian to create in language not necessary bound by a literary text. This article suggests that it is not the aesthetic function of a text that is important; it is the actualization of the communicative and voluntary function that comes to the fore. Pragmatics then is more important than aesthetics in linguistic creativity. To prove her thesis, the author analyzes the language of advertising from the point of view of the correlation between pragmatics and aesthetics. These ads, or «mini texts» demonstrate innovations, which function in the context of “syntactic minimalism.” These innovations are determined by the addresser’s pragmatic choice of a specific, non-conventional expression mode. In some cases, these innovations become valuable from an aesthetic point of view. This study also deals with certain trends in linguistic creativity in the sphere of commercial naming, e.g.in naming of restaurants, cafes, shops. These trends are determined not only by the addresser’s perception of linguistic creativity as an attention-getting mechanism but also by the possibilities inherent in the linguistic system of the Russian language. This article suggests that the aesthetic value of commercial names could be determined by combining verbal and non-verbal devices, because the latter play an important role in the sphere of the widespread linguistic creativity.