NEW WORDS, NEW MEANINGS OR KNOWLEDGE SHARING: THE LEXICAL EXPANSION IN BULGARIAN AND GERMAN

Abstract

The research focuses on the cultural and linguistic analysis of neologisms in modern Bulgarian and German. It covers theoretical, applied, and experimental aspects, with a methodology correlation through a comparative and intercultural-pragmatic approach. Neologization is commonly used to expand vocabulary, and is nornaly recorded in dictionaries to emphasize its linguistic significance. The fast pace of globalization, technology advancement, and societal networking is transforming society into a global village. This evolution gives rise to various new objects and phenomena of universal nature and highlights the need of knowledge sharing. These changes impact language, affecting communication and the encoding of new information in unpredictable ways. New products constantly enter the market, introducing unfamiliar names. Communication, as the main means of understanding and expression, as an instrument for exchanging messages, is therefore subject to diverse and sometimes unpredictable procedures for encoding. We are all increasingly dealing with new products coming onto the market whose names we do not know. In the world of IT, computers and mobile devices need to be constantly updated with the latest technologies and applications; Medicine has to combat new diseases that are not yet known, for which there are no names, such as new affective disorders or new addictions (computer game and Internet addiction), eating disorders (orthorexia), etc. The job market is looking for professionals who need to have new skills in order to continue practicing the profession of a social counselor or call center agent. The food and clothing industries are constantly developing new things that very often become a must: the coffee-to- go, the Düner restaurant, the fast food menu. Such new word formations obviously occur more often on similar occasions: In addition, they open up possibilities for expressive speech or for use in marketing communication, in networks and, above all, in the media, from where they easily enter common language. In this way, neologisms as a concept can also become an interesting scientific desideratum with added value, as is the case here. The current linguistic interest is based on the multi-expanded observation, both in terms of theory and in the use of language. A first reason is that they have a peculiarity denotative meaning, which often occurs with a change in meaning. A few cases can be mentioned: the English word “follower” in the meaning of successor changes to follower: followers, e.g. on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or Twitter.
This article is descripitive oriented and sees itself as a contribution to German and Bulgarian neologism research, using different styles (everyday language, literary language, technical/scientific language, media language) and discourses (e.g. engineering, technology, social media, tourism, food industry, fashion, cosmetics, healthcare). For its final validation it takes into account main results of a previous conducted corpus analysis.