Neologisms in Modern English: study of word-formation processes

http://tartu.ester.ee/record=b2654513~S1*es

GOING GAGA: POP FANDOM AS ONLINE COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

Among various fan sites dedicated to pop stars, GagaDaily is one prominent online collective that centers around Lady Gaga. This study is a piece of ethnographic research focused on two claims – GagaDaily constitutes a Community of Practice (Eckert, 2006) in an online setting, and the regular use of humor by users fulfills social and pragmatic roles in the discourse. Communicative phenomena (both textual and graphic) that characterize the linguistic repertoire of GagaDaily members were catalogued from the first 100 pages of one thread within the forums. These data were grouped into categories corresponding to different dimensions of language use as well as media/literary devices. Alongside a quantitative analysis of various tokens and types of data, a qualitative examination of selected excerpts from the sample confirm the veracity of the two main claims. When analyzed with regard to Wenger’s definition of a Community of Practice (Wenger, 2009), GagaDaily meets all three of his requirements. Likewise, the analysis of humor reveal that GagaDaily users regularly engage in the first dichotomy of the tactics of intersubjectivity, adequation and distinction (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004) and incorporate GIF images in their humor to express their alignment with stance objects (DuBois, 2007) and other members

Building rapport and a sense of communal identity through play in a second language classroom

Many teachers would recognize that a certain amount of laughter and play in a classroom is one of the signs of a socially cohesive and contented group of learners. However, on the face of it, language play in a multinational second language classroom would seem to be highly constrained by an apparent lack of common cultural reference points and, at the lower end of the proficiency spectrum, by the linguistic abilities of the learners. This paper features an investigation into language play consisting of a teacher and two low-proficiency adult learners from different professional fields and nationalities, enrolled on an intensive Business English course. The analysis is informed by Goffman’s concept of frame, by Bakhtin’s ideas about the heteroglossic and dialogical nature of language, and by Bauman and Briggs’s notion of recontextualization. It shows how the learners build a common pool of prior talk and reference points, alluding to them humorously. The data consists of a series of short episodes which together trace the development of one such shared reference point. Over two days, the learners transform an incident which highlights their shortcomings in the language into a celebratory resource that they playfully use to build rapport and to help in the construction of a shared sense of identity and culture. I argue in this paper that the language play found in the featured data is very similar in kind to that in native speaker interactions

Methods Acronyms - The Witty Side of Science

The name of a method usually contains its basic principles. To simplify the name of a method and make it easier to remember, an acronym is often used. However, sometimes the name of a method and its acronym are formed in such a way that the result often has quite a different or even humorous meaning. Here we have sorted out acronyms of scientific methods that have unusual or humorous meaning. The summation is a list of representative methods that represent the true face of science: an interesting, skillful and joyful human activity

Imena metoda i akronimi - duhovita strana znanosti

The name of a method usually contains its basic principles. To simplify the name of a method and make it easier to remember, an acronym is often used. However, sometimes the name of a method and its acronym are formed in such a way that the result often has quite a different or even humorous meaning. Here we have sorted out acronyms of scientific methods that have unusual or humorous meaning. The summation is a list of representative methods that represent the true face of science: an interesting, skillful and joyful human activity.Ime metode najčešće sadrži opis njenih osnovnih načela. Kako bi se pojednostavio naziv metode, a samim time i olakšalo pamćenje naziva, redovito se upotrebljavaju akronimi. Međutim, često se događa da su ime metode i njezin akronim osmišljeni tako da dobiveni naziv ima potpuno drugačije značenje te ponekad i humorističnu konotaciju. Izdvojeni su akronimi znanstvenih metoda koji imaju neuobičajena i često humoristična značenja. Pregled ovih akronima je zbir reprezentativnih metoda koje prikazuju znanost u njezinom pravom svjetlu kao zahtjevnu, zanimljivu i zabavnu ljudsku aktivnost

Humour With a Purpose: Creativity With Language in Facebook Status Updates

This paper examines everyday linguistic creativity and humour in Facebook status updates. Analysis of the updates, collected in 2011 from 60 UK users, shows how people achieve particular humorous tones through creative combinations of lexis and syntax, adding reinforcements such as innovative punctuation to tighten the construction of the update. The linguistic features they use are not in themselves novel, but the creativity lies in the individuals' effective selection and use of them. The language is often playful, but the whole performance has a serious purpose: people invite a sympathetic perspective on themselves. Humour, particularly self-deprecation, is used to construct a personal narrative and thus perform their identity. In short, the paper celebrates the capacity of ordinary people to seize opportunities for using language skilfully and creatively to represent themselves and their lives

INDONESIANS’ TENDENCY TO REFER ABBREVIATION AS ACRONYM: TYPES OF ABBREVIATION AS WORD FORMATION PROCESS

The purpose of this research is to analyze the tendency of Indonesians to assume all types of abbreviation is acronym. This study examines the types of word formation process of abbreviation, and whether abbreviation or acronym is the correct umbrella term for this particular morphological process. Using library research method, this paper refers to two key morphology researchers from Britain and Indonesia, Laurie Bauer and Harimurti Krisdalaksana respectively, as well as one Indonesian Doctorate Arie Ansrasyah Isa whom referred the former two researchers in her study that proposes 16 types of abbreviations using data from top Indonesian newspapers, Jakarta Post and Kompas. This paper concludes that common people in Indonesia refer all abbreviations as acronyms because their high preference in abbreviating long phrases stems from the desire to increase pronounceability and familiarity of words, usually in the context of humor, but is highly prevalent in all situations, formal or non-formal

Anglicisms and Vocabulary Dynamics in the Romanian Online Communication

The development of technological devices and the expansion of electronic communication and social media channels in the last few years has had a significant impact on how people communicate, especially in online written communication, particularly among young people, regardless of their nationality. Moreover, we can currently refer to our society as to a global society in which English prevails as a tool for communication and interaction between speakers of different languages particularly in the cyber space. Since English is the language of global communication, English loanwords constitute a linguistic and socio-cultural phenomenon. The creation and the development of this phenomenon is mainly owed to advances in electronic communication and technology, since the usage of English is widely spread from the IT to the economic and sociocultural fields. The influence of English on the Romanian language has been the object of numerous studies. In order to fill in a gap in the analysis of anglicisms in Romanian, the objective of this paper is to analyse the influence of English in the online communication between young people in Romania. Particular focus is given to a number of aspects of the vocabulary dynamics of Romanian: the position, the form and the functions of anglicisms, from a lexical and semantic perspective. Examples from the following sources will be illustrated and discussed: fashion articles from youth online publications, recordings of video blogs and podcasts as well as YouTube videos