THE 21st CENTURY IN ENGLISH WORDS OF THE YEAR: FLEXIBILITY OF MODERN ENGLISH VS LINGUISTIC CONCEPT OF WORD

Alla D. Belova, profbelova@gmail.com

ORCID: 0000-0002-3014-326X

Doctor of Sciences in Linguistics, Professor,

Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/StudLing2024.25.21-31

PDF (ENGLISH)

ABSTRACT 

The article explores words of the year (WOTY) announced by the Oxford English Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary, Merriam Webster Dictionary, and American Dialect Society in terms of the linguistic concept of Word. WOTY poses questions about the changes in the requirements for a word as the basic unit of language that spans orthography, morphology, word formation, naming, categorization, semiotics, and semantics. The list of 77 English WOTY that label the 2001-2023 period is based on two major varieties of English (British English and American English) and, thus, mirrors the anglo-centric vision of the world, burning issues of the 21st century, global and national events. In many cases, WOTY is of historical value as it encapsulates vital human problems. Linguistically, WOTY reveals enormous changes in the English language and the factors that trigger the immense popularity of these words. Many prominent linguists and philosophers of the 19th-20th century made a significant contribution to the linguistic concept of Word, describing the correlation between a word and a concept or notion, a word and a part of speech, structural, semantic, and syntactic aspects of Word, its uninterruptability and positional mobility. Due to the wide diversity of languages in the world, the characteristics of words are not universal. Unprecedented flexibility of English, new trends in spelling and word formation, specific word coinages in English of the 21st century make pretty obvious the fact that traditional criteria for a word are becoming lenient. Suffixes -ism and –ussy, two-word expressions as WOTY prove the Word borders become less tightened. Hashtags neutralize word spacing as a crucaial parameter in the distinction of words and question the correlation of a word and a part of speech. Pictorial elements (emojis) and hashtags emphasize the fusion of alphabetical and non-alphabetical symbols in the domain of English-language communication. Penetration of non-alphabetical scrips (#, emoji, numerical symbols) into the English language, including WOTY, reflects the impact of video gaming, text messaging, ICT, and digital technologies on the English of young generations.

Keywords: linguistic concept of Word, non-alphabetical script, Word of the year

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