STYLISTIC NEOLOGISMS IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE CHICK LIT: MORPHOSEMANTIC ASPECT

The aim of this article is to reveal major word-formation processes involved in the formation of stylistic neologisms and decipher their meanings. The overall objectives to achieve the established goal were as follows: to identify samples of stylistic neologisms in a corpus of English-language chick lit; to single out the morphological operations employed to manufacture stylistic neologisms in English-language chick lit; to identify how the creation of stylistic neologisms straddle the boundaries of core morphology; to describe the communicative purposes of stylistic neologisms in English-language chick lit and interpret their semantics. Stylistic neologisms are viewed as new words, whose expressive power is the result of morphological transgression. The neologicity of these creations is diagnosed against a range of criteria including their con- codification in dictionaries, inobservance or overall infrequency in corpora, semantic opacity, and formal deviancy. It is agreed upon that neologisms that transgress morphological conventions of word-formation are stylistically utilic combining social and expressive meanings. As such, they stand out as means of conveying humor, playfulness, and creativity, as well as serve as tools to build and maintain relationships, construct identities and the world around them, mitigate and persuade. The methodological basis of the research was a complex of the following methods: purposeful sampling (to demonstrate the specificity of morphological patterns employed for stylistic neologisms formation, their meaning making, and meaning interpretation); definitive and component analysis (to establish the basic meanings of the new lexical units components); typological method (to classify major word-formation methods utilized for the production of stylistic neologisms in English-language chick lit); functional method (to clarify the pragmatic potential of stylistic neologisms in English-language chick lit). The typological description in this article takes a derivational approach that assigns the concept of word-formation productivity to the level of grammatical word-formation competence, which accounts for potential words. Derivational patterns utilized for the production of new words were listed as those involving additive and metamorphic processes. The typological description of stylistic neologisms in ELCL was contextualized in this study on Item-and-Process approach falling under lexeme-based morphology which sees a word form as a result of word formation rule. An important outcome of this research is the recognition that the methods used to create stylistic neologisms in English-language chick lit align with standard conventions regarding fundamental morpho- logical conventions. They include affixation, compounding, clipping, and conversion, with suffixation dom- inating the list. Although adhering to these established word-formation processes, creatively crafted neol- ogisms in English-language chick lit are not restricted by derivational constraints. A unique process utilized in the creation of stylistic neologisms is decompounding, when a compound word is dissected, and its indi- vidual segments operate independently.