The Digital Stratum of a Linguistic Paradigm

The specific of functioning for artificial intelligence and digital stratum is an important direction of interdisciplinary, including linguistics, researches in the modern world. The subject of the study is the voice assistant Alice of the Yandex company with the inbuilt Yandex GPT2 neural network. The object under the study is the AI functioning on the materials of phraseological units and set phrases of the Chinese and Russian languages with the universal semantic component смерть / death. The conceptual category of смерть / death was chosen due to the existence of the Russian and Chinese cultural tradition represented on the rich background ascendant to folklore images. The novelty of the study consists in understanding the notion of “a digital stratum as a separate component of the linguistic paradigm, according to N.I. Tolstoy, and it is introduced and discussed for the first time. In course of linguistic experiment, we managed to reveal four types of generations on the AI stimulus words: 1) the absence of generation; 2) the generation of the existing phraseological units and set phrases of direct and indirect nominations; 3) the hybrid generation; 4) the digital or arbitrary generation. By means of the continuous sampling method there were identified 50 % of the AI generations both in Russian and in translated into Russian materials. The results of the study allow conclude that there takes place of forming the digital stratum of the linguistic paradigm owing to the evolution of the virtual environment of language functioning. With time, textual generations which at present seem to be antilogical, could enter the live conversational style and become widely-used ones due to the mass use of voice systems in various spheres of daily living activities.