Neologisms and Polysemy in Social Media: A Morpho-Semantic Analysis

Document Type : Original Article

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the effect of using social networks onto the
language of users in terms of word meanings and forms. Hence, this
research is a linguistic study of the morphological characteristics of the
language of social media through vivid examples from daily posts on
social media. It looks into the role of social media in improving or
worsening the linguistic performance of users. The research deals with
up-to-date data in order to be examined from a morphological
perspective. Due to the presence of large platforms of social networking
sites, this study will be limited to neologisms in a specific media
applications, Twitter and Facebook that are basically written in or
deviated from English language. The sample of the study consists of
random users of social media such as Twitter, Facebook and other
applications that people usually use to communicate. The theory of
morphological productivity is employed in the study to reach a
conclusion on the most frequently used word formation processes that
lead to social media neologisms. Results of the study indicate that social
media and communication applications often determine the users‟ choice
of words.

Keywords

References

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