A Linguistic Investigation of English Buzzwords Associated with Barack Obama
Abstract: The present thesis studies the morphology and lexical semantics of the many buzzwords associated with Barack Obama. First of all, it is found that blending is the most productive in the word-formation rules used in the creation of the ten buzzwords. Second, by making a comparison between their contextual meanings (concordance lines of instances searched in Google) and dictionary definitions of the suffixes, an overall characterization of the emergent view of lexical semantics of “Obama” buzzwords is proposed. And one significant feature of the ten buzzwords is that they share the same semantic basis—the charisma and influential image of Barack Obama.
Key words: morphology, emergent semantics, Obama, buzzword
Contents
Abstract 1
摘 要 1
1 Ten variations in “Obama” buzzwords 3
1.1 Introduction 3
1.1.1 Definition of buzzwords 3
1.1.2 Background information about Barack Obama 5
1.1.3 The ten words’ entrance into the English language 5
1.2 Previous studies of new words 6
1.3 Organization of the thesis 7
2 The morphology and lexical semantics of the ten words 7
2.1 The word-formation of the ten words 7
2.2 Lexical meanings of the ten words 8
2.3 Semantic basis of the ten words 19
3 Conclusion 20
3.1 Summary of the main points of the thesis 20
3.2 Possibilities for further studies 21
References 23
Acknowledgements 24
