Structural semantic particularities of new lexical units of civic life at the beginning of the 2000’s as reflected in the newspapers NEW YORK POST and NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Author(s):  E.I. Kriger, Moscow State Pedagogical University, Moscow, Russia, rusil2005@yandex.ru

Issue:  Volume 39, № 1

Rubric:  Linguistics

Annotation:  In recent years, many new lexical units have appeared in the media, formed by various models and methods that need to be classified and described. New words in American newspapers are insufficiently studied by linguists, and there is very little work on neology in the American media. The purpose of this article is to conduct a theoretical analysis of the word-forming resources of the modern newspaper language and to identify the most productive ways of forming new lexical units in the thematic group "public life". In this regard, the author shows the relationship between acute social problems of modern society, its "pain points" and the need to create new lexical units to describe new realities of life. The structural semantics of new units is studied using component analysis. Abbreviations are considered: merging the initial fragment of one word and the final fragment of another, directly telescopes and blends. The frequency of manifestation of specific ways of word formation is demonstrated: contamination, abbreviation, shortenings, borrowings. Metaphorical hyphenation for giving a word a new meaning and abbreviations are presented as promising and fruitful ways of forming new units. The results of the research make a real contribution to the study of neology, as well as to the theory of word formation of the English language at this stage of its development. For the first time, an analysis of new lexical units in the American press is made from the point of view of their structural semantics and pragmatics, considering their connotative meaning.

Keywords:  contamination, means, metaphor, model, new meaning.

Full text (PDF):  Download

Downloads count:  251