Media text as a source for studying new word-formation and lexical semantic changes in modern Serbian

Abstract

Under the influence of globalization in media texts in Serbian language, as well as in all other Slavic languages, many new words, originating from the English language, have appeared. Those words, hybrids, began to fill the dictionaries of neologisms of all Slavic languages, including Serbian dictionaries. They represent a combination of an English stem and a Slavic affix, or vice versa. However, today the creativity goes even further, and more and more Serbian words that appear in media texts are combining affixes that they never had before. Thus, those words are given new grammatical and pragmatic functions. Many of these new words will never move from the sphere of occasionalisms to the sphere of neologisms, i. e. they will never be more widely used. On the one hand, the authors of media texts (first of all, columnists) nowadays take the liberty to cross the boundaries of the word formation and the use of lexemes, in the way that only writers, especially poets could do so far. This paper lists and describes word formation and grammatical innovations associated with the onomatopoeic adverbs, word formation and grammatical innovations with verbs, word formation and semantic innovations associated with diminutive forms, and noun innovations with a zero suffix. It is important to understand that these creative processes the journalist starts with Serbian language and ends with Serbian language, which contains in itself a hidden influence of (anglo-) globalization onto Serbian language. It may also represent a psycholinguistic impact of globalization on the linguistic behavior of Serbian speakers. The same process occurs in other Slavic languages, and the special attention should be given to that, since we are talking about language changes caused by a borrowed model of behavior and thinking.