Neologisms in Social Media. a Corpus-Based Study of Institutionalization

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,5, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Anglistik), course: Linguistik, language: English, abstract: The aim of this study is to investigate the institutionalization of neologisms in social media, more precisely in blogs, with a geographical view to the countries where English is the first or second official language. Especially since globalization and social media become increasingly integrated into our daily life, it is a phenomenon worth investigating. Neologisms belong to the process of word-formation; thus, this thesis belongs to the field of lexicology.

The structure of the work at hand is as follows. First, there will be a concise review on the relevant theory on World Englishes and the institutionalization process of neologisms. It should demonstrate the impact of language change. Further, the data source, the corpus of Global Web-based English1, will be described and the method used for the analysis will be explained. The following step includes the corpus analysis and inspects several neologisms regarding various categories. Afterwards, a presentation and evaluation of the results helps to assess the hypothesis. Lastly, a summary and interpretation of the findings concludes this thesis and gives an outlook on further research opportunities.