Semantic and Structural Aspects of Donald Trump’s Neologisms

Authors

  • Liudmyla HOLUBNYCHA Doctor of Science in Education, Ph. D in Education, Full Professor, Department of Foreign Languages # 3, Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University, Kharkiv, Ukraine
  • Ilona Kostikova Doctor of Science in Education, Ph. D in Philology, Ph. D in Education, Full Professor, Head of Department of Theory and Practice of the English Language, H.S.Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University, Kharkiv, Ukraine, http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5894-4846
  • Tetiana BESARAB Ph. D in Philology, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages # 3, Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University, Kharkiv, Ukraine
  • Yevheniia MOSHTAGH Ph D in Philology, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, O.M.Beketov National University of Urban Economy in Kharkiv, Kharkiv, Ukraine
  • Yuliia LUSHCHYK Ph D in Education, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, Sumy National Agrarian University, Sumy, Ukraine
  • Olga DOLGUSHEVA Ph. D in Philology, Associate Professor, Department of the English Language and Methods of its Teaching, Volodymyr Vynnychenko Central Ukrainian State Pedagogical University, Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18662/po/11.2Sup1/178

Keywords:

authorial neologism, semantics, structural aspects, negative connotation

Abstract

The article exposes the semantics and structure in neologisms of current US President Donald Trump. The analysis of Donald Trump’s authorial neologisms as a leading political figure on a global scale, whose language influences the English-speaking world, shaping his picture, seems significant and timely. The aim of the study is to identify and systematize the semantic and structural features of D. Trump’s neologisms. The tasks are to analyze the lexical content of public speeches, interviews and posts on D. Trump’s social networks in order to identify new lexical units created by him and to summarize them; to define the semantics and structure of D. Trump’s neologisms. The findings are 30 new lexical units attributed to D. Trump. Their analysis makes it possible to organize them into usual (which are already in the dictionaries of modern English), discursive (which function in the discourse but are not yet fixed in Oxford dictionary), and new lexical units of indefinite nature. The analysis of the semantics in found neologisms has revealed what they describe the new realities of contemporary political life in the United States of America. The analyzed neologisms have predominantly a negative connotation. The conclusion of the paper is D. Trump’s neologisms have structural differences as the following: they are either phraseological neologisms or morphological neologisms built by the affixed method, either as abbreviations, or as a play on words.

Author Biography

Ilona Kostikova, Doctor of Science in Education, Ph. D in Philology, Ph. D in Education, Full Professor, Head of Department of Theory and Practice of the English Language, H.S.Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University, Kharkiv, Ukraine,

Department of Theory and Practice of the English Language, Professor

References

Abadi, M. (2016). ‘The blacks’, ‘the gays’, ‘the Muslims’ – linguists explain one of Donald Trump's most unusual speech tics. https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-the-blacks-the-gays-2016-10

Abadi, M. (2017). Trump won’t stop saying ‘my generals’ – and the military community isn’t happy. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-my-generals-my-military-2017-10

Abadi, M. (2018). We can thank FDR for the word ‘iffy’ and Trump for ‘fake news’ – here are 13 words US Presidents brought into everyday English. https://www.businessinsider.com/presidents-words-donald-trump-george-washington-abraham-lincoln-2018-5#fake-news-donald-trump-13

Ahmadian, S., Azarshahi, S., & Paulhus, D. L. (2017). Explaining Donald Trump via communication style: Grandiosity, informality, and dynamism. Personality and Individual Differences, 107, 49 – 53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.11.018

Britzky, H. (2017). Trump has called “FAKE NEWS”. https://www.axios.com/everything-trump-has-called-fake-news-1513303959-6603329e-46b5-44ea-b6be-70d0b3bdb0ca.html

Cambridge Dictionary: English Dictionary, Translations & Thesaurus. (2019). https://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Collins Online Dictionary: Definitions, Thesaurus and Translations. (2019). https://www.collinsdictionary.com/

Desmond-Harris, J. (2016). Why Donald Trump says “the” before “African Americans” and “Latinos”. https://www.vox.com/2016/10/20/13342646/donald-trump-african-americans-latinos-race-racism-inner-city

Deverell, S. (2019). Is clicktivism the new activism? https://minutehack.com/opinions/is-clicktivism-the-new-activism

Dictionary.com. (2019). Homepage. https://www.dictionary.com

English Dictionary, Thesaurus, & Grammar Help: Lexico.com. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.lexico.com/

Estepa, J. (2018). Covfefe, one year later: How a late-night trump tweet turned into a phenomenon. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/05/31/covfefe-one-year-anniverary-donald-trumps-confusing-tweet/659414002/

Esteve Del Valle, M., Wanless-Berk, A., Gruzd, A., & Mai, P. (2018). Unpredictably Trump? Predicting clicktivist-like actions on Trump's Facebook posts during the 2016 U.S. primary election. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society (pp. 64-70). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org.10.1145/3217804.3217898 ·

Globalnews.ca. (2016, September 26). Presidential debate: ‘I’m going to cut taxes big league, you’re going to raise taxes big league’ [Video]. Global News. https://globalnews.ca/video/2965432/presidential-debate-im-going-to-cut-taxes-big-league-youre-going-to-raise-taxes-big-league-trump

Hains, T. (2017). Chuck Todd to Kellyanne Conway: “Alternative facts are not facts”. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/01/22/chuck_todd_to_kellyanne_conway_alternative_facts_are_not_facts.html

Hunt, J. (2017). ‘Fake news’ named Collins Dictionary’s official word of the year for 2017. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fake-news-word-of-the-year-2017-collins-dictionary-donald-trump-kellyanne-conway-antifa-corbynmania-a8032751.html

Kean, D. (2017). Oxford Dictionaries add ‘clicktivism’ and ‘haterade’ as new words for angry times. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/24/oxford-dictionaries-add-clicktivism-and-haterade-as-new-words-for-angry-times

Kuper, S. (2017). ‘The Trump show’ – reality TV at its most compelling. https://www.ft.com/content/a41f0638-7c89-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c

Macmillan Dictionary: Free English Dictionary and Thesaurus. (2019). https://www.macmillandictionary.com/

Matthews, S. (2018). Trump doesn’t care about what actually causes violence. https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/trumps-comments-on-mental-health-after-the-florida-school-shooting-ring-hollow.html

Michael McIntee. (2017, September 20). Trump cites a made up African Country - Nambia – Twice [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go7tRznOE1g

Scream: A typo trump acknowledged a new word. (2017, December 30). http://z-news.link/scream-a-typo-trump-acknowledged-a-new-word/

Tauberg, M. (2016). Analyzing Trump’s tweets. A data-based analysis of Trump’s language on Twitter. https://medium.com/swlh/analyzing-trumps-tweets-5368528d2c90

Trump, D. (n.d.a). Home [Facebook page]. Facebook. Retrieved 2020, from https://m.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/

Trump, D. [@realDonaldTrump]. (n.d.b). Tweets & replies [Twitter profile]. Twitter. Retrieved 2020, from https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump

Tyrkkö, Y. (2016). On the (changing) sociolinguistics of political language: From the Queen’s speech to Trump on Twitter. Historical sociolinguistics network abstract. https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hison2016/files/2016/02/HiSon-abstract_Tyrkk%C3%B6.pdf

Zimmer, J. (2016). The potent simplicity of Donald Trump. https://mannerofspeaking.org/2016/03/04/the-potentsimplicity-of-donald-trump/

Downloads

Published

2020-09-07

How to Cite

HOLUBNYCHA, L., Kostikova, I., BESARAB, T., MOSHTAGH, Y., LUSHCHYK, Y., & DOLGUSHEVA, O. (2020). Semantic and Structural Aspects of Donald Trump’s Neologisms. Postmodern Openings, 11(2 Supl 1), 43-59. https://doi.org/10.18662/po/11.2Sup1/178

Publish your work at the Scientific Publishing House LUMEN

It easy with us: publish now your work, novel, research, proceeding at Lumen Scientific Publishing House

Send your manuscript right now