New Words in English: Their Morphological and Semantic Mechanisms

Student: Suslova Darya

Educational Programme: Fundamental and Computational Linguistics (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2018

This thesis shows how new words appear in English and how they are used. The goals are to highlight the most expanded semantic areas, to detect the most common patterns of word-formation for neologisms, and to determine which words are likely to stay in the usage. The main material for this research are lexicographic databases which contain lists of new words, their meanings and typical contexts. I also use data collected from social networks to test the actual usage of new words by language speakers. As the result, I expect to identify the most rapidly expanding semantic spheres, the most frequent ways to coin new words, and the most entrenched neologisms that have been recently acknowledged lexicographically (added to the dictionary). This thesis can become a contribution to the modern lexicography as the source of the semantic fields within which new concepts and names for them are most likely to appear.

Student Theses at HSE must be completed in accordance with the University Rules and regulations specified by each educational programme.

Summaries of all theses must be published and made freely available on the HSE website.

The full text of a thesis can be published in open access on the HSE website only if the authoring student (copyright holder) agrees, or, if the thesis was written by a team of students, if all the co-authors (copyright holders) agree. After a thesis is published on the HSE website, it obtains the status of an online publication.

Student theses are objects of copyright and their use is subject to limitations in accordance with the Russian Federation’s law on intellectual property.

In the event that a thesis is quoted or otherwise used, reference to the author’s name and the source of quotation is required.

Search all student theses