Semantic and Structural Aspects of Donald Trump’s Neologisms

Abstract

The article exposes the semantics and structure in neologisms of current US President Donald Trump. The analysis of Donald Trump’s authorial neologisms as a leading political figure on a global scale, whose language influences the English-speaking world, shaping his picture, seems significant and timely. The aim of the study is to identify and systematize the semantic and structural features of D. Trump’s neologisms. The tasks are to analyze the lexical content of public speeches, interviews and posts on D. Trump’s social networks in order to identify new lexical units created by him and to summarize them; to define the semantics and structure of D. Trump’s neologisms. The findings are 30 new lexical units attributed to D. Trump. Their analysis makes it possible to organize them into usual (which are already in the dictionaries of modern English), discursive (which function in the discourse but are not yet fixed in Oxford dictionary), and new lexical units of indefinite nature. The analysis of the semantics in found neologisms has revealed what they describe the new realities of contemporary political life in the United States of America. The analyzed neologisms have predominantly a negative connotation. The conclusion of the paper is D. Trump’s neologisms have structural differences as the following: they are either phraseological neologisms or morphological neologisms built by the affixed method, either as abbreviations, or as a play on words.