English Word Formation on the Internet

This paper examines the processes of word-formation in English on the Internet. More specifically, the present paper provides an overview of newly formed words in the context of Internet communication, their categorisation, coupled with analysis and discussion with a view to determining which (if any) word formation processes have been employed in the process of their creation. The paper attempts to capture the current trends of the English language used in popular areas of Internet interactions. The theoretical preliminaries have been divided into two distinct parts - the first half which presents general notions related to internet communication while in the second one the theory behind word-formation processes is presented in order to enable its application to the corpus originating from Internet data used in this study. As for the corpus and methodology in the study, the selected terms and expressions were extracted from various online sources (forum posts, chat logs or game screenshots) and analysed in order to determine which word-formation process they belong to. Hence the sections on abbreviations and acronyms, clips, conversions, compounds and blends, as the most productive word formation processes observed in the study. The study also looks at the popular notions of blog and tweet, as well as a particular focus on leetspeak which deals with words falling into this category but are formed via many different processes. The final section of the paper provides a summary of the findings and a conclusion to the inquiry into the nature of word-formation on the internet.