THE WORD FORMATION PROCESS IN DIGITAL MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

In the context of the rapid development of digital communications, word-formation mechanisms are gaining particular importance, serving as a key tool for the prompt description of new social phenomena and the construction of media meanings. Digital media discourse, encompassing online media, social networks, and blogs, generates a wide range of neologisms, actively adapting borrowed bases through the use of suffixes, prefixes, and compounding. Despite the high productivity of word-formation processes, there is a lack of systematic research into the factors that determine the choice of particular models (suffix, prefix-suffix, compounding) and their pragmatic function in creating media narratives. This complicates the forecasting of lexical trends and the effective management of the informational field in the digital environment. The study demonstrated that a comprehensive linguistic analysis of -изация nouns in online media was conducted to show that their word-formation bases are predominantly verbderived, all of which have long been established in Russian. However, contemporary foreign roots continue to integrate according to a different model: first the borrowed base enters general usage, then -изация is appended, giving rise to new terms; additionally, we observed the rapid creation of “one-day words” (derived from celebrities’ names) and analyzed instances of compounding with foreign bases. The research revealed that these word-formation mechanisms remain highly productive in the digital media sphere, swiftly responding to societal demands and facilitating rapid public comprehension of emerging phenomena.