21st-Century Neologisms – Word-formative Strategies and Adaptation (a Corpus Study of English and Bulgarian)

Abstract

This study focuses on some word-formative strategies used in the 21st century newly coined English vocabulary and English borrowings in Bulgarian. The fast development of new technological products necessitated the coinage of new lexical units to name them. Following the definition, the term ‘neologisms’ is appropriately associated with new words or groups of words. The corpus of this study, however, consists of vocabulary which has already been included in the dictionaries of Standard English, and Bulgarian. This research tries to determine the processes of adaptation which the English borrowings undergo when they are adopted in the target language, as well as the whole word families created around the new word. Some loan words when they enter a foreign language begin to give rise to derived units. We claim that this technique helps the progress of the new vocabulary into the target language and its assimilation.