The investigation provides a thorough analysis of neologisms in the political discourse, reveals the peculiarities of their creation and use on the basis of British newspaper articles and audio / video materials of TV news. The peculiarities of the language of media political discourse were revealed, the expediency of using neologisms in mass media texts, their structural and semantic models were substantiated.The efficiency of coining new words by affixation, word formation, conversion, telescopy is confirmed. It has been proved that political neologisms most often perform word-forming, nominative and emotive functions. The use of neologisms for the nomination of socially significant concepts of politics, power and global current problems are revealed. Lexical-semantic groups of political neologisms have been singled out, the most numerous of which are groups to denote people – participants of communication, political processes, parties and associations. The analysis of modern media text at the lexical level allowed us to trace the main trends in enlarging the vocabulary of the media, reveal the links of neologisms with thematic and genre-style peculiarities of texts in which words and phrases function in their new meanings. It has been proven that modern mass media have been enlarged significantly by neologisms with positive and negative connotations as well as derived words formed from borrowed bases to denote new realities, particularly in political discourse. It has been found out that new words have a greater semantic capacity compared to similar counterparts in the language, in addition, they play a special stylistic role in the text – pun. The analysis of statements of various politicians has made it possible to explore the features of political culture and consciousness of a particular social group. Among the lexical means of creating political neologisms, it is worth noting the use of numerous repetitions, appeals to the readers’ or viewers’ audience. Political neologisms have been studied according to the following criteria: belonging to a certain class (lexical, phraseological and semantic), sources of origin (The Guardian, The Times, audio / video materials CNN News, BBC News), method of creation (affixation, composition, conversion, reduction, telescope, abbreviation, acronym, borrowing), word-forming potential (productive, non-productive, author’s), connotation (positive, negative, neutral), frequency of use (absolute, relative), thematic sphere of use (power, politics, state, society, people, law, democracy, integration, global problems of today).
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