Dublin Core
Title
ARE YOU A BOOKBURNER? “PEOPLE AND SOCIETY” NEOLOGISMS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 21ST CENTURY
Abstract
Diachronic study of a language demonstrates how the language changes significantly over a period of time and neologisms are one of the greatest indicators of language transformation. Therefore, the field of neologisms which came to existence in the English language in the period from 1950 to 2000 and which belong to the semantic group labeled as "people and society" is morphologically examined. This semantic group comprises neologisms related to characteristics of people, their habits, social groups as well as typical social phenomena such as human rights, education, religion, etc. Methods applied in this research are method of corpus analysis, method of diachronic and synchronic analysis and method of questionnaire. The main hypothesis is that neologisms in the semantic field of ‘people and society’ have quantitative ascent since the commencement of the 1950s until the year 2000. The supporting hypotheses are related to productivity of each major word formation process and instability of neologisms. Productivity of certain word formations, derivation and compounding in particular, is examined in the coinage of ‘people and society’ neologisms. Stability/instability of neologisms is examined in two ways: through corpus analysis and survey. Namely, research on frequency of neologisms coined in the 1950s in contemporary dictionaries of the English language is carried out. Native speakers’ knowledge of these neologisms is examined by means of survey among native speakers from Canada, Australia, the USA and the UK. The overall aim of this research is thorough analysis of neologisms that entered the English language since the middle of the twentieth century and examination of recent trends in English word formation. Keywords: word, word formation process, neologism, categorization, people and society
Keywords
Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed
PeerReviewed
Date
2014
Extent
3531