Occasional coinages in mass media discourse

Syrvatka D. Occasional coinages in mass media discourse : bachelor's thesis : 035 Philology / supervised by O. Popivniak. Kyiv, 2025. 97 p.

This Bachelor’s thesis explores the structural and semantic features of occasional coinages in mass media discourse. The aim is to determine their role in shaping and reflecting modern public consciousness by examining how language and media interact to form new vocabulary that expresses current worldviews. The study is based on 222 occasional coinages. These words were selected from articles, online sources, and dictionaries. To examine their use in real media contexts, examples were taken from television, social networks, news articles, YouTube videos, blog posts, hashtags, and websites. The coinages were grouped into thematic categories such as Covid-19, Brexit, and Ecology, depending on their meanings and the topics they describe. The research methods include the analysis of scholarly sources to build the theoretical framework, along with descriptive, comparative, and generalising approaches, as well as discourse studies. The Paper shows that occasional coinages are widespread across various media formats and are often context-dependent. A key feature of occasional coinages lies in their temporal nature: they tend to be actively used when a specific issue dominates public discourse but may gradually disappear as attention fades. For example, coinages related to Covid-19 or Brexit were highly prevalent in past years but are now less common. In contrast, ecology-related coinages continue to emerge and gain visibility, as environmental concerns remain a growing and long-term topic. These observations confirm that language evolves in close connection with society. The conclusions contribute to the fields of neology, discourse analysis, media studies, and sociolinguistics.