Exploring the Lexicon of Digital Communication Through Corpus Linguistics

The rapid growth of digital technologies and online platforms has dramatically reshaped everyday language. Social media, messaging apps, and forums create fast-moving spaces where people communicate in short, creative bursts-leading to tons of abbreviations, fresh slang, borrowed terms, and brand-new words popping up all the time. This study takes a corpus linguistics approach to examine the vocabulary of digital communication. By drawing on large, real-world collections of online texts (from tweets, posts, chats, and more), it tracks word patterns: how often new terms appear, where they show up most, and the contexts that help them spread. The core focus is on neologisms and the main word-formation processes driving them in online discourse, including: compounding (e.g., combining words like "doomscrolling"), affixation (adding prefixes/suffixes, like "yassified" or "un-"), blending (mashing words, e.g., "delulu" from "delusional"), clipping (shortening, like "sus" from suspicious or "vibe" from vibration), borrowing (pulling in terms from other languages or subcultures, like "rizz" going global). These processes highlight the playful, adaptive side of digital language, showing how it quickly responds to new tech, memes, trends, and social shifts. Overall, the research demonstrates the power of corpus methods for capturing real-time lexical change and offers fresh insights into how online vocabulary keeps evolving in our hyper-connected world.

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