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Social space is heterogeneous; it is represented by a variety of different cultures and subcultures. All the variety of subcultures represented in the modern urban space can be divided into groups, depending on the nature of the prevailing activity linking the members of the subculture. Recently many subcultures related to the use of computers have emerged. The entertainment industry offers a huge variety of computer games to a modern person, which predetermines the number of people involved in this subculture. One of the most important features of most subcultures is their sociolect. The subject of our study is the sociolect of gamers. The material of the study is comprised of the lexical units used by fans of computer-based online games like MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). As a result of the analysis of the lexical material it was revealed that other slang systems serve as sources for the formation of the gamer sociolect, primarily programmer slang and general slang. On the one hand we can distinguish a common vocabulary (the core of the sociolect) in the sociolect of gamers. On the other hand the sociolect of gamers appears as not a homogeneous phenomenon: it consists of different "sublanguages", the features of which are determined by the game mode (online / offline), genre variety of games, specific games, etc. Thus there is a single subculture of gamers which at the same time has a heterogeneous character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the local variation of student slang that reflects the social continuum - the blurred boundaries between social groups. Slangs serve "open" social groups because each slang speaker is inevitably included not only in one social group, which makes the social base of a certain slang, but also in other social groups. The example of studying foregrounded slang words in four Russian regions shows that some local variation in student slang is not so much reflected in difference of slang vocabulary but in difference of the frequency values of slang words: there is a significant influence of the factor "locus" on the knowledge and use of certain slang words. The nature of a slang word explains its having a number of meanings because it not only denotes and nominates but also reflects the social dimension, thereby showing a great opportunity for social variation of slang units. A variety of lexical variants in slang is directly linked with the reflection of the social continuum in the language. The continuous nature of the social base of slang defines the probabilistic nature of the slang and provides both its unity, flexibility, volatility, as well as the ability to meet the needs of slang speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this article is to compare the structure of the frame "Educational Activity" in the mental lexicons of teachers and students - the social groups where people are connected by the fulfillment of contradicting activities but interdependent social roles. The research method is a kind of associative chain test, namely the method of revealing the actual lexicon. The qualitative analysis of the experimental data is based on the semantic classification of responses and allows representing the structure of the frame as a set of subframes and slots. The quantitative analysis made it possible to take into account the size of each component of the frame and represent the model as a hierarchical structure. The analysis of the results showed that the structure of the frame "Educational Activity" in the mental lexicon of teachers and students is not quite the same: the core of the students' frame "Educational Activity" contains more subframes than that of the teachers', the subframes' ranks of the teachers' and students' frame structures are not the same. The qualitative variety of responses and the structure of each of the slots of the subframe also vary depending on the group of informants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]