Current neological processes in the contemporary Russian language (on materials of sociolinguistic Internet-projects)

We analyze Russian projects “Word of the Year”, “Dictionary of Changes”, “Dictionary of the Year” (2014-2017), which show what lexical units are in the focus for their importance and relevance for society members. We analyze words as a current part of the thematic group for present moment that reflects dominant ideas of the meaning of a year. We pay attention to the fact that many words have a social and political orientation. We identify the subjective principle of formation of projects’ lists and study neological processes marking changes in the contemporary Russian language vocabulary. We classify represented lexical material according to the nature of neological processes, the way of a word entering the language considering the possibility of its further consolidation the language. Mentioned grouping of lexis enable to identify that the following processes are current for contemporary Russian language: activation of certain lexical-thematic groups with extralinguistic factors, a transformation of lexical semantics and co-occurrence, replenishment of vocabulary due to active processes of modern word creation and borrowing, creative usage of language system possibilities. The most frequent language methods used for verbalization of current phenomena, events, facts of objective reality such as the method of paromynic attraction, the method of blending, verb word formation, suffixation, semantic reinterpretation are considered.

neologism, sociolinguistics, “Word of the Year”, current vocabulary, word formation