Disapproved / Approved Fragments of Contemporary Social Reality: Unusual Neonominations

Abstract

The article presents the study of word-building, semantic, motivational, syntagmatic, and functional characteristics of non-usual neonominations that appeared in 2005 and have been used in Russian-language Internet communication since that time to the present, denoting the objects of social reality that are either approved or disapproved. The performed analysis has made it possible to identify internationalization, intensification, intellectualization and integration as current trends in the creative neologization of this semantic area. The most productive methods of non-usual word formation in the studied lexical subset include blending, lexicalization of an abbreviation, stem truncation; less frequent – holophrasis, graphics, the inclusion of a foreign component in the centaur word; rarely used – reduplication, tmesis, anagram, stepwise way of word formation, pluralization, creation; irrelevant – the emancipation of the morpheme, the spillage of the word. It is shown that a most creative reaction of Internet users is caused by disapproved objects of reality with a variety of rejected socially significant features; their neonominations are used in contexts with a dominant negative average tone. The dominant regular sphere of functioning of neolexemes, which are formed in unusual ways with the semantics of disapproval/approval are such genres of Internet communication as social networks, blogs and forums. Protologisms, even with a transparent internal form and a readable motivation, are rarely conventionalized. Most of the unusual neonominations of unacceptable/acceptable objects of social reality can be attributed to transnominatives, whose nominative purpose is secondary.

Keywords

• neology
• non-usual word formation
• semantics
• motivation
• syntagmatics
• internet communication