Ideological Conflict and Lexical Change: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Culture-War Neologisms in English

Background. The article explores English lexical and semantic neologisms related to culture wars, i.e., the ideological confrontation between conservative and liberal sets of values and beliefs. While such neologisms mostly appear in the US context, they have also permeated the political and media discourse in other Western countries. The purpose of the study is to trace the functional and semantic patterns of the key culture-war neologisms based on the corpus NOW, one of the largest and continuously updated online English corpora. Methods. The study combines qualitative and quantitative approaches. The key methods were diachronic frequency analysis, collocation analysis and concordance analysis, which helped to reveal semantic connections of terms under study, resemantization processes, as well as the extent of their entrenchment in the media. Corpus findings were further analyzed from the perspective of critical discourse analysis with regard to stance-making and social polarization they simultaneously reflect and perpetuate. Results. Culture-war neologisms manifest a particularly contested and fluid semantics, which reacts to power and ideological shifts in the society. The key semantic processes we have traced in their emergence and development are broadening ("deplatforming", "cancel culture", "microaggression"), metaphorization ("snowflake", "safe space"), and pejoration ("woke"). Moreover, these neologisms often undergo the reversal of ideological attribution between the left and the right in the process of mutual targeting. Conclusions. The findings show that culture-war neologisms do not simply mirror political polarization but actively contribute to the weaponization of language, transforming lexical choice itself into a marker of ideological alignment in contemporary public discourse. Our study thus highlights an important role of neologisms as linguistic markers of ideological conflict. Further research might focus on cross-linguistic investigation of culture-war lexicon or explore its changing semantics from the viewpoint of psycholinguistics.