Structural and pragmatic features of directive hypertext (on the basis of the hashtags of Occupy Wall Street protest movement)

Social networks reflect the reaction of individuals and society to events, a separate group of which are represented by socio-political protests, creating and broadcasting new slogans of protest campaigns, calls and actions. In this context, special attention should be paid to the communication potential of hypertexts and their semantic features in second-generation Internet networks during the period of global digitalization of society. An integral part of this work is the history of research on the hashtagging process by both domestic and foreign scientists. The purpose of this article is to determine the directive power of protest movements in the modern media space and to understand the mechanisms of formation of the textual component of socio-political protests. The material of this study was a range of digital lexical units of protest movements (#DeleteUber; #BellLetsTalk; #DeleteFacebook; #SaveOurOceans; #OccupyWallStreet; #TakeAKnee), which are important socio-political movements, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The research corpus was formed using purposeful sampling. The study was conducted using pragmasemantic analysis, linguistic observation, as well as elements of statistical analysis. As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that the directive potential functions in the field of second-generation Internet networks both at the semantic level, combining the signification, denotation, media files associated with the main digital lexeme, and at the syntactic level with the presence of imperative verbs. The author's personal contribution is to provide a new paradigm for the study of lexical units within the framework of semantics and highlight the directive factor of lexemes used in protest actions on the basis of contextual analysis of #OccupyWallStreet movement.