Neologisms in present-day german: investigation into productivity of word formation types

Abstract

The urgency of this paper is determined by a lack of research into the influence of the English language on modern word-building of the German language in the context of the study of lexical innovations. The purpose of this study is to provide a linguistic analysis and a detailed description of the word-building models using words from the corpus of neologisms Wortwarte.de. The principal approach to this research is the semantic-morphemic analysis, on the basis of which the word formation models and types are distinguished and presented in the form of statistical data. This paper highlights the aspects of the influence of the English language on the word formation system of the German language; examples of hybrid word formation are given. The study shows the impact of the English language on the current state of the German language, presents the statistical data on the use of modern word formation types, and reveals the dynamics of the use of hybrid neologisms. Materials of this research can be useful for linguists in studying the word formation processes in the German language, as well as in studies in the field of cognitive and social linguistics. The value of this paper consists in the study of modern word formation patterns in German, which can serve as verification basis in the subsequent research.

Keywords: word-formation, hybrid formation, neologism, word-formation tendency, blending, composition, affixation, corpus.