Lexical Creativity – A Salient Phenomenon in Current Romanian TV and Online Journalism

Abstract

Abstract The article aims to examine an aspect pertaining to lexical neology, i.e. the lexical creativity as reflected in recent TV and online journalism. Lexical creativity articulates interdisciplinarity, the latter represents a ‛bridge‛ between the facts of language and those of style. Newly words are created by journalists to serve different purposes ranging from ludic, spontaneous, occasional to deliberate, conscious. Lexical creativity is influenced by different factors such as: analogy, imitation, calque, subjectivity, sensitiveness, context, etc. The language of the media is characterized by dynamics, novelty and accessibility. Through their novelty, words contribute to an enrichment of expressiveness. The newly coined structures are often artificial, the examples analysed in our paper are created by small groups of journalists or by one journalist. The journalists’ intention is to impress, to draw the audience’s attention. I chose to explore the phenomenon of affixation and I selected as lexical bases some neologisms recently borrowed into Romanian from other languages. The corpus comprises recent examples selected by the author from Romanian TV and online journalism, where the phenomenon of lexical creativity is highly displayed. I chose the transcription of new words in accordance with the phonetic-phonological principle specific to the Romanian language and with the current rules pertaining to plurals forms and use of articles.