Neologisms in English

New words, as a rule, appear in speech of an individual person who wants to express his idea in some original way. This person is called «originator». New lexical units are primarily used by university teachers, newspaper reporters, by those who are connected with mass media. Neologisms can develop in three main ways: a lexical unit existing in the language can change its meaning to denote a new object or phenomenon. In such cases we have semantic neologisms, e.g. the word «umbrella» developed the meanings: «авиационное прикрытие»,»политическое прикрытие». A new lexical unit can denote an object or phenomenon which already has some lexical unit to denote it. In such cases we have transnomination, e.g. the word «slum» was first substituted by the word «ghetto» then by the word-group «inner town». A new lexical unit can be introduced to denote a new object or phenomenon. In this case we have «a proper neologism», many of them are cases of new terminology.In the sphere of lingusitics we have such neologisms as: machine translation, interlingual / an artificial language for machine translation into several languages / and many others. Neologisms can be also classified according to the ways they are formed.They are subdivided into: phonological neologisms, borrowings, semantic neologisms and syntactical neologisms. Syntactical neologisms are divided into morphological /word-building/ and phraseological /forming word-groups/. Phonological neologisms are formed by combining unique combinations of sounds, they are called artificial, e.g. rah-rah /a short skirt which is worn by girls during parades/, «yeck» /»yuck» which are interjections to express repulsion produced the adjective yucky/ yecky. These are strong neologisms. Strong neologisms include also phonetic borrowings, such as «perestroika» /Russian/, «solidarnosc» /Polish/, Berufsverbot / German /, dolce vita /Italian/ etc. Morphological and syntactical neologisms are usually built on patterns existing in the language, therefore they do not belong to the group of strong neologisms. Among morphological neologisms there are a lot of compound words of different types, such as «free-fall»-»резкое падение курса акций» appeared in 1987 with the stock market crash in October 1987. Here also belong: call-and-recall - вызов на диспансеризацию, bioastronomy -search for life on other planets, Ameringlish /American English/.Quite a number of neologisms appear on the analogy with lexical units existing in the language, e.g. snowmobile /automobile/, danceaholic /alcoholic/, airtel /hotel/, cheeseburger /hamburger/, autocade / cavalcade/.There are many neologisms formed by means of affixation, such as: decompress, educationalist etc. Phraseological neologisms can be subdivided into phraseological units with transferred meanings, e.g. to buy into/ to become involved/, and set non-idiomatic expressions, e.g. electronic virus, Rubic’s cube, retail park, acid rain, boot trade etc.