Abstract:

The pandemic and lockdown restrictions have spurred text communication with the use of electronic appliances. But the crisis has forged a new form of the so called ‘fingered’ languages – texting. The procedure how we construct and decipher the information in texting makes the case of the research.

Texting has been associated with a decline in speech communication, but recent linguistic researches in pragmatic nature of verbal communication have provided a profound basis for its interpretation and usage in teaching professional communication and translation. With the rise of the so called fingered language, cognitive procedures of texting deserve special scientific attention.

The paper focuses on the results of the research into organization of a news text by highlighting information markers as pragmatic particles and studying the ways of their verbalization. The growing tendency to economize on verbal means is demonstrated by a wide use of abbreviations, and acronyms in professional communication.

The present paper includes the analysis of experiment carried out during the research where the students of non-linguistic faculties of MAI University and MGIMO University took part. Seventy students were divided into two groups: the first group was given a professional text with extensive verbal description of events and facts. All abbreviations and acronyms used in the text had been taught in advance. The students didn’t have any difficulty in comprehending the text. Moreover while comprehending the text the students took notes in order to restore the information afterwards by reproducing it both in the native and target languages. When taking notes, they used their own abbreviations and acronyms as well as those which were familiar to them. The analysis of the individual symbols and short forms of speech substituting usual verbal means testified to personal uniqueness of processing information procedures.

The second group was given the same text but verbalized in a different – compressed – way with an abundance of acronyms and abbreviations that made it sound like sort of texting. The experiment demonstrated that without special knowledge of professional abbreviations and acronyms the students failed (89 per cent) to understand their meaning, and texting has proved to be incomprehensible. Hence, the group that has not been specially taught the meaning of the used abbreviations and acronyms failed the task.

The research permits to make the following conclusions. It is evident that cognitive procedures of texting are not universal. The scope of professional knowledge, good command of grammar rules, propensity for logic assumption as well as intuition and cognitive potential contribute to texting comprehension and management.

Keywords:

Comprehension, verbal compression, cognitive potential.