Respondent
Theme
Neologization of the Czech socio-political vocabulary of the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries.
Defence Date
Annotation
Thesis for the Candidate Degree in Philology – speciality 10.02.03. – Slavic
languages. – Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Lviv, 2015.
The thesis deals with the study of the process of neologization in socio-political
vocabulary in modern Czech language. The research is based on neological material
from the last decade of the 20th and the beginning of the 21th century. New words and
words with new meanings were collected from the dictionaries of neologisms, print and
electronic media, the electronic neologic database Neomat and Czech national corpus.
In this work the enrichment of the Czech socio-political vocabulary by new lexical
elements was analyzed in reference to intra- and extra-linguistic factors. The emergence
of new lexemes and new meanings in Czech is closely related to intensive political and
economic tramsformations and significant social changes occuring in the Czech
Republic after 1989.
Attention is payed to the theoretical problems of neology, mainly to the typology of
neologization processes, to the various approaches to the term „neologism‟ in modern
linguistics according to chronological, stylistic, lexicographical, structural, denotative
and psychological criteria. Neologisms are considered as the new lexical units, new
meanings, actualized words, occasionalisms and potential words that emerged, expanded
or changed their functional area or connotative meaning during the 90s of the 20th – at
the beginning of the 21st century.
The lexical corpus, comprising more than 1900 Czech socio-political neologisms
has been analysed on structural and functional basis. New lexical units have been
classified into 9 thematic groups which are linked to new social and political concepts,
processes, realities etc.
The thesis also focuses on the main ways and sources of neologization in the Czech
social and political vocabulary: word-formation and semantic derivation. The results
reveal that the largest group of new socio-political lexemes was coined by means of
word-formation components of both international and domestic origin in anteposition
and postposition. It has been noticed that the biggest part of new derivatives is
represented by nominal designations (69 %). In noun word-formation the most
productive are prefixes (anti-, ex-, de-), suffixes (-izace, -izmus, -ista, -ák, -ka),
combining forms (euro-, narko-, eko-, čecho-, šéf-, -gate, -kracie). The socio-political
vocabulary is enriched by adjectival designations (22 %), the largest part of which is
formed by adding anti-, post-, pro-, proti-, -ový, -ský/-cký, -ní. The smallest groups are
represented by newly coined verbs (6 %), created on the basis of loan noun stems by
means of suffixation and prefixation, and new adverbials (3 %).
The dynamics of the Czech language system is also supported by modifications in
the semantic structure of words. The most productive type of qualitative changes within
the Czech socio-political vocabulary is broadening of the meaning, which is based on
metaphor and metonymy.
The research highlights the important role of mass-media in the process of Czech
socio-political lexicon neologization. Media discourse demonstrates the pragmatic
potential of the neologisms through the modifications of their sematic structure in the
new context. Moreover, lexical innovations as the result of word-formation of the Czech
politicians were studied. Lexical units which were “renewed” in their use and meaning
were also examined in the thesis.
The dissertation also focuses on the analysis of new designations on the material of
the Czech national corpus. It determines that 89 % of socio-political innovations taken
from the dictionary of neologisms occur in corpus texts.
Key words: neologization, socio-political vocabulary, neologism, methods of
word-formation, word-formation innovation, semantic neologism, actualized
vocabulary, functioning in the modern Czech language.