French loan words in modern American fiction

The paper deals with the origins of modern English vocabulary and shows the relevance of the influence of French on its modern state. The article makes a survey of scientific literature studying French heritage in English lexis. An overview of linguistic and historical data is provided to show the framework within which linguistic borrowing from French was made possible. A number of loanwords are mentioned that appeared under different historical circumstances. The article analyses borrowed words that kept their meaning they had in French, as well as those ones which experienced semantic transformation. The paper concentrates on the fact that frequency of English words having French roots is high enough in the novel by J. Grisham and they form a thick layer of common words. The article demonstrates, what kind   of impact the change in culture-specific concepts had on the meaning of the words borrowed from French and highlights possible prospects of such kind of studies. The paper emphasizes semantic layers of loan words and shows that finance vocabulary, the vocabulary of law and politics and the vocabulary of health are closely connected with borrowings from French

Selfie neologisms in social networks

The paper deals with modern trends in word formation connected with the development of virtual communication, social networks distribution and the possibility to be present in cyberspace on a permanent basis. The research concentrates on social media interaction as the main source of neologisms that reflect and describe digital portraits Internet users make and post on the web. Preconditions for newly coined words to continue their existence and become common are considered. Digitalization provides a large spectrum of opportunities for neologisms to be noticed by a wider audience and creates a demand for new coinages. At the same time, a new word should be similar to those existing in a given language in order to arouse interest of potential users. For this reason, the article considers different mechanisms of neological word formation that proved to be efficient. The methods used allow to assess the derivational potential of new coinages, define the most productive word building techniques, adequately interpret the words’ meaning and classify the neologisms under consideration into groups. The results obtained show relevance of digital portrait-based coinage in modern English and demonstrate prospects for further research in the field of digital communication neology