The features of the self-nomination of English-speaking adolescents in Internet communication - in a social network such as Twitter microblogging are discussed in the article. The focus of the article is the anthroponymic units of Internet communication - nicknames belonging to Internet users of the age group of 12-17 years. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to fill up research gaps in socio-, psycho- and ontolinguistics, as well as the unflagging attention of philologists to the anthropocentric aspects of Internet communication. The novelty lies in an integrated approach to the consideration of the features, methods and means of naming teenagers on Twitter. The nominative potential of nicknames is analyzed. In accordance with the nature of the constitutive token, self-nomination groups of autonomous, pseudonymous, and transitional types are distinguished. Conclusions are drawn about the characteristics of the anonymity of teenage names on Twitter (the degree of anonymity and its expressiveness). The authors also dwell on the structural aspect of virtual individual names, identifying the most productive models of property creation in virtual space. The results of a graphical analysis of the research material are presented, accompanied by a quantitative characteristic of paraverbal means. The analysis has established a correlation between the psychological new formations of adolescents and the characteristics of their nicknames on Twitter. It is shown that the inconsistency and originality of the considered stage of the ontogenetic development of users is projected onto their self-nomination.

The paper aims to explore the Internet nickname as a main anthroponymic unit of Internet communication, an integral part of a virtual personality, and an outcome of complex psycholinguistic processes of self-naming. An overview of key studies of this phenomenon leads the author to conclude that it still lacks proper theoretical grounding, which is largely due to its specific properties that impede research. The article focuses on the issues that arise at the stage of material selection. The main points for discussion were suggested both by the analysis of existing research on the topic, as well as empirical data collected during almost ten years of anthroponymic studies of German-language virtual communication. The first issue relates to the necessity of using external sources (users’ personal data, their social media imprint) for reliable analysis and interpretation of nicknames. Thereby, the paper argues the relevance of content and discourse analysis for studying virtual personality, as well as interviewing the users to obtain a comprehensive research file. Since random sampling remains the key method for selecting factual material, the question persists about the sufficient amount of the data. The article highlights the solutions proposed by different researchers and gives sociolinguistic groundings to the minimal number of data that ensures a representative sample of aliases. Finally, the question of the choice of sources is raised. The author concludes that an unconditional trend in anthroponymic research of nicknames is the study of units within one specific Internet service.

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