Spoiler: the content of the genre and its detailing taking into account the "author" and "addressee" factors

Abstract

The article is devoted to the spoiler genre, namely its content characteristics, as well as the factors of the author and the addressee, which are analyzed taking into account the following paired characteristics: more knowledgeable / less knowledgeable, interested / disinterested, complicit / indifferent. Recordings of Russian everyday speech, as well as Internet texts, mostly extracted from the modern context of social networks, were used as material for observation. The analysis of the factors of the author and the addressee, taking into account the time characteristics, allows us to assert that the emergence and implementation of the spoiler genre takes place a) when the author directly marks the genre of the statement – “at the entrance to the topic”; if it does not occur, b) when the corresponding genre marking is made by the addressee – “in the development of the topic”. Otherwise, we are dealing with the usual retelling of the plot. In most cases, this speech genre starts as an initiative act in the author's performance; however, it can also be formed within the boundaries of a reactive statement when the interested addressee makes a request for specific information of this kind. The perception of the spoiler, respectively, can be different: negative, up to aggression; neutral, up to indifference; positive, even benevolent, demonstrating a variety of different emotional response options. As for the spoiler medium, it is massively used on the Internet, in the space of social networks, oral communication, as an element is included in articles and reviews of films, TV series, plays or books. The significance of this research, therefore, is seen in the need to study and understand the socio-communicative experience of new generations, which differs in many ways from traditional communicative practice: the spoiler genre diversifies interpersonal communication of young people, and the corresponding lexeme is one of the units of its active vocabulary.