2019 Vol. 10 №2

The article deals with the process of structuring the concept of the fictitious state of San Escobar from the perspective of social semiotics, including the broadly understood context and media environment for constructing the image. The creation of the internet memes was in­spired by a lapsus linguae of the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Witold Waszczykowski. Major changes in the communicative space, the dominance of digital media resources and multimodal messages, the hegemony of visual culture and the increased impact of the social factor on the specifics of linguistic transformations contribute to the growing popularity of social semiotic studies. In the theoretical part of the paper, I give a brief analysis of the evolu­tion of the concept of "context" in linguistics from the perspective of systemic functional gram­mar, cognitivism, social semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis. The analytical part of the article explores the constructed media image of the fictitious state of San Escobar through the prism of the following contexts: situational-medial, cultural-cognitive, linguistic, inten­tional and socio-economic. Summing up the specifics of the formation of meaning in narrative social practices, I draw conclusions about the recontextualization of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas concerning the polyphonic nature of language and communication.