Intersemioticity and multimedia: transition from traditional to electronic texts

The article looks into such features of modern electronic texts as intersemioticity and multimedia nature. Studying these features is essentially a new stage in researching intertextual relations; hence the article first turns to non-electronic texts, presenting on their basis the theoretical grounds of the notions in question, and only then proceeds to electronic texts tracing the evolution of the traditional conception of text. Electronic texts are regarded as multimodal, i.e. resulting from the synthesis of diverse semiotic objects and joining text and media in one syntagm. In order to distinguish the most common combinations of text and media, to explore the reasons why users combine them, and to establish their percentage ratios, the authors have conducted a social and linguistic study, whose results are analyzed in the article.