COVID-19 trending neologisms and word formation processes in English

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
Saleh Al-Salman ◽  
Ahmad S. Haider

The surge of new words and phrases accompanying the sudden COVID-19 outbreak has created new lexical and sociolinguistic changes that have become part of our lives. The emergence of COVID-19s coinages has remarkably increased to establish a trending base of global neologisms. The present study attempts to investigate the nature of the new English words and expressions that emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. It also identifies the type of word-formation processes that contributed to the emergence of these neologisms in the English language. The researchers compiled a corpus of 208 COVID-19-inspired neologisms from different sources, including social networking websites, search engines, blogs, and news articles. The analysis revealed that word-formation processes were so varied to cover all possible forms of derivation, including affixation, compounding, blending, clipping, acronyms, among others, along with dual word-formation processes, with compounding and blending being the most discrete. The findings showed that the flux of new terms demonstrates the creativity and vitality of the English language to respond to emerging situations in times of crisis. The study recommends that further research be carried out on the new terms that have been transferred to other languages as loanwords, loan-translations and loan-blends.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Laila Othman Baram ◽  
Aram Kamil Noori

This research studies the widening range of forming and using blend (portmanteau) words in English language. It sheds light on the fact that most blend words are exocentric not only for second language learners but also to natives too, since they have not been listed in English dictionaries. Even if listed; still the continuous process of forming blend words will leave no room to catch up with listing all of them. English nowadays has become the most dominant language and at the same time it has been influenced by some factors as much as it has been influential. In terms of word formation processes especially blending, one can realize how rapidly and unexpectedly new words are coined for new purposes in accordance with daily life needs. In this era of speed; English native speakers, as their nature, do like to economize in their word choice especially in their word formation processes such as blending, acronyms, clipping and all types of abbreviations. In fact, the inevitability of life change as the result of daily life’s needs inventions influences English language in many ways. In addition, the policy of economizing and being selective reflects well on letter choice and word forming processes. In relation to this, the consequences of life change can be noted in studying blend forms in English. Some simple examples are: blunch, chexting, spork, feminar, brinner, brunch, fanzin, hubot, smog, etc. In a nut shell, the research states the inevitable and intriguing change of English words in the process of blending in which two or more words are cut and mixed together to form a new form, called a blend word. One basic point here is that a blend word is not simply one word; brinner as an example is formed from three other words (breakfast + lunch + dinner) to describe a situation in which you just have one meal instead of the three. Most of blend words have not so far been listed in English dictionaries. So this continuous process of forming new words does a great change to English vocabularies now and in the upcoming years.



Author(s):  
O. Polonskaya ◽  
Ya. Polonskaya

The proliferation of new words and phrases accompanying the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has led to new lexical and sociolinguistic changes that have become part of our lives. The present study attempts to examine the nature of new English words and expressions that emerged after the COVID-19 pandemic and to determine the type of word-formation processes that contributed to the emergence of these neologisms in English. The problem is that the emergence of a large number of neologisms associated with the COVID 19 pandemic creates difficulties when translating and applying them in speech. The object of the study is neologisms that appeared during the period of the COVID pandemic in the English language in 2020-2021. The subject of the research is the peculiarities of the formation of neologisms in modern English. The relevance of this work is conditioned by the need to study the new vocabulary that appears in speech due to the changes taking place in modern society under the influence of globalization. Language reflects today's changes as a global and unprecedented phenomenon, the memory of which will remain in history. Lexical neoplasms emerged during the pandemic period allow people to be versed in what is happening, regulate relationships and adapt to new living conditions.



2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2 (17)) ◽  
pp. 19-28
Author(s):  
Sirarpi Karapetyan

The syndetic or conjunctional analytical word-formation structures with noun component are very productive in the Armenian and English languages from the point of view of forming new words. The paper is devoted to the comparison and contrast of the structural, grammatical and semantic peculiarities of the syndetic (conjunctional) analytical word-formation structures in Armenian and English. In Armenian they are mainly formed with the help of the conjunction “ու”, rarely with the conjunction “և”. In English these units are generally formed with the help of the conjunction “and” and belong to the type of the so-called phrase compounds. Besides the conjunctional compounds, phrasal compounds also include the so called syntactic compounds which resemble segments of speech corresponding to the syntactic and word order rules of the English language, e.g. Jack-of-all-trades “a person who can do many different kinds of work”, lily-of the-valley “a European plant of the lily family”; this type does not have its typological equivalent in Armenian. The examples of syndetic analytical structures provided in this paper are mainly taken from English and Armenian dictionaries.



2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Hüning

Word formation, like other lexical phenomena, seems to be a difficult terrain for contrastive linguistics since it hardly allows for significant and insightful generalizations about the differences between two languages, as has been stated in the literature more than once. This paper investigates one factor leading to morphological differences and contrasts between historically related languages (Dutch and German). It is argued that word formation processes often show semantic fragmentation: in the course of time they develop ‘semantic niches’, i.e. groups of words (subsets of a morphological category) kept together by formal and semantic criteria and extendable via analogy. When looking at word formation from a contrastive point of view, these niches seem to allow for better generalizations in terms of systematic correspondences and differences between two languages than the category as a whole. As a consequence, productivity should not be seen as an absolute notion, but rather as a local and gradual phenomenon. Morphology should not only account for the possibility of coining new words but also for their probability, because language comparison shows that even allegedly equivalent word formation processes often differ with respect to the probability of their use. The paper therefore argues in favour of an analogy approach that takes the existence of semantic niches seriously.



Author(s):  
Alisha Vandana Lakra ◽  
Md. Mojibur Rahman

Change is the nature of every  living language for better communication. These changes can be phonological, morphological, syntactical and lexical, because of various linguistic affects. The synchronic and diachronic study of language proves that it enriches the vocabulary of the language. Another reason for the enrichment of vocabulary is through morphological word formation process which are mainly inflectional, derivational, compounding and reduplication, etc. Reduplication is implicit to phonological (sounds and prosodic units) and morphological (word constituents) components. It occurs in many languages and helps in the formation of new words. The present study concentrates on the process of reduplication Kurukh and the role of reduplication  in acquiring vocabulary.



2017 ◽  
pp. 149-154
Author(s):  
Om Joshi

The purpose of this paper is to find out the effect of using the Whatsapp messages on the English language. This is the age of social networking site. The researcher will discuss the effect of Whatsapp messages on English from a structure, grammar, punctuation, code language, symbol usage, emoticon usage, abbreviation, acronym, fusion, coinage of new words, vowel usage etc. The researcher sums-up and reports findings based on the data analysis and interpretation. Along with this, the researcher also enunciates the favourable and adverse effects of Whatsapp messages on English.



2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Yulie Neila Chandra

<p>Affixation is one of the process of morphological in Mandarin. Affixes are bound morphemes that are added to other morphemes to form larger units such as words, especially to form a compound word (成词 héchéng cí). Mandarin has two types of affixes: prefixes (precedes the morpheme) and suffixes (follows the morpheme). Prefixes are rare in Mandarin, such as {初chū-}, {第dì-}, {非fēi-}, {可kĕ-}, etc;while suffixes are more numerous, such as {儿-er}, {化 –huā}, {家 –jiā}, {们 –men}, {员 –yuán}, {者 –zhĕ}, {子-zi}, etc. In Mandarin, affix morphemes can also be divided into two functional categories, namely inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes, both refers two principal word formation processes: inflection and derivation. Although, Mandarin is not the inflection language, only prefix {初chū-} and suffix {们–men} are inflectional morphemes. Therefore, the derivation process is more productive in Mandarin. Derivational morphemes form new words by changing the meaning of the base (root) and the word class. In consequence, derivation in Mandarin may cause a change of word classes; such as nouns, verbs, and adjective, but generally form nouns.</p>



2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4(68)) ◽  
pp. 44-46
Author(s):  
A. Ibrahimova

The vocabulary of literary language of modern English that becomes rich these days we can see from the development process of its word formation. The role of history of prefixes in forming of new words in the word building is extensive. The article was explored the charachteristics of the history of the English language prefixes. During the Ancient and Middle Ages, prefixes were commonly used less in word formation than before. The decrease in prefixes, of course, is due to certain reasons. Some English prefixes, on the other hand, are derived from OE adverbs and prepositions, and ME and NE are more advanced in number in the creation of new words.



2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 324
Author(s):  
Rio Rini Diah Moehkardi

This research aims to explore the word-formation process in English new words found in the internet-based media through acronym, compound,  clipping and blending and their meanings. This study applies Plag’s (2002) framework of acronym and compound; Jamet’s (2009) framework of clipping, and Algeo’s framework (1977) in Hosseinzadeh  (2014) for blending. Despite the  formula established in each respective framework,  there could be occurrences  of novelty and modification on how words are formed and  how meaning developed in  the newly formed words. The research shows that well accepted acronyms can become real words by taking lower case and affixation. Some acronyms initialized non-lexical words, used non initial letters, and used letters and numbers that pronounced the same with the words they represent. Compounding also includes numbers as the element member of the compound. The nominal nouns are likely to have metaphorical and idiomatic meanings. Some compounds evolve to new and more specific meaning. The study also finds that back-clipping is the most dominant clipping. In blending, the sub-category clipping of blending, the study finds out that when clipping takes place, the non-head element is back-clipped and the head is fore-clipped.





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