Functional and semantic specificity of diakopa (on the material of tweets in English and Russian)

Abstract

The article deals with the question of studying diacope and the peculiarities of its use in English and Russian tweets. The author defines the term ‘diacope’ and examines its nature and functions in the text. It is underlined that it is important to study diacope because it is used in the texts of different kinds and helps to show feelings and emotions of the author or to emphasize their words. The study analyzes short messages taken from Twitter. Rhythmanalysis tool has helped to identify the examples of diacope use in English and Russian tweets. The analysis reveals what parts of speech are repeated, the number of repetitions and the number of words between repetitions. It also shows that diacope is much more often used in English than in Russian tweets. The tool has detected the repetitions of both notional and auxiliary parts of speech in English as well as in Russian. In most cases diacope occurs within a sentence and represents only one repetition of the element in both languages. The number of words between repetitions can also vary but most commonly there are two or three words. The author concludes that it is important to take a further look at diacope because of the questions that arose during the study.