Contemporary English Political Neologisms in the Aspect of Word Formation

Abstract

The expansion of the contemporary English vocabulary caused by some geopolitical factors outlines the complexity of the mechanisms responsible for introduction of new words and their formation. The emergence of new political strategies and manipulation tools that influence modern language tendencies is a never-ending process, which is the reason why this field of linguistics is understudied. The research materials include online editions of The New Yorker, Time, Politico, Sky News, etc. Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the official websites of the EU Council, European Student Think Tank, and the Congressional Research Service. The research methods combine word formation and semantic analysis of the gathered lexical units from the viewpoint of their morphological and contextual characteristics. The study has revealed 102 political neologisms of the mentioned period. Moreover, the word formation analysis has allowed to establish telescopy (57%) as the most efficient method of forming new words, and abbreviation (2%) – as the less common one. The peculiarities of political neologisms are as follows: the evaluation component is the core characteristic of the personalized neologisms; the prevailing political neologisms are ones with a negative connotation based on the irony and grotesque; there is a close connection between the word formation method and both the semantics and connotation of the neologism (ex. in case of adding gate-suffix, or x morpheme) that allows the recipient guess its definition without reference to the context.