The paper views such a modern discourse format as chat communication on the Internet. Chat communication is considered as verbal and paraverbal interactions between the users of Internet chat services. This problem is of great interest to linguists because new speech genres constantly emerging in the Internet due to dynamic technological progress require additional consideration. The relevance of the study is determined by the lack of knowledge about chat as a communication format in modern linguistics. The purpose of the article is to identify some linguistic-stylistic features of modern English-language chats, demonstrating such contrasting qualities of the expression plane as redundancy and economy. The research material was taken from the English-language chats (Spinchat.com) and user comments (Reddit.com), aimed at discussing entertainment content. The research revealed that saving speech effort in English chat communication at the lexical level is manifested primarily by abbreviations consisting of three or four graphemes, as well as shortened words formed by syncope and apocope. Redundancy of speech efforts is expressed in the opposite activity of the addresser of chat communication: the speaker lengthens the speech chain due to graphic multiplication, which can also lead to a functional shift of graphemes. Although such techniques as abbreviation, technocratic writing, and the use of emoticons help to express thoughts more concisely, their multiplication is simultaneously regarded as a form of redundancy in chat communication. The prospects of this study include consideration of redundancy and economy of linguistic means in various genre transformations of the English language chat.
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