2026· International Journal of Languages Literature and Linguistics· 0 citations· 11 references
Abstract
—In December 2023, Oxford English Dictionary selected rizz as the Word of the Year . This study examines the relationship between conceptual meanings of rizz and its source word charisma through constructing semantic networks. Based on authentic corpus data from COCA, NOW, and English-language social media platforms, semantic networks are constructed with ROST-CM6. The findings indicate that while charisma is broadly used across different contexts to describe intrinsic personal magnetism, often associated with leadership, rizz is more narrowly referred to attractiveness from romantic partners. Moreover, this study reveals that the rapid diffusion of rizz is attributed to its viral circulation on social media, broadcast by mainstream media, celebrity endorsement, and simplicity. In conclusion, this study demonstrates how semantic network analysis can elucidate the evolving meanings of neologisms and provide insights into the mechanisms underlying their dissemination.
This study investigates the semantic construction of Generation Alpha slang in the lyrics of “Rizzler” by Jelly House, a song that reflects the growing influence of digital culture, meme-based communication, and online social interaction on contemporary youth language. Despite the increasing prominence of Generation Alpha slang in digital spaces, studies examining its semantic characteristics in popular music remain limited. Therefore, this research aims to identify the lexical and contextual meanings of slang in the song and to determine the dominant meaning type that shapes their interpretation. Employing a descriptive qualitative approach, study adopts Lyons’ semantic theory as its analytical framework. The data consist of ten Generation Alpha slang terms extracted from song lyrics and analyzed through three coding stages: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. The findings reveal that contextual meaning is substantially more dominant than lexical meaning, with eight slang terms interpreted primarily through situational, cultural, and linguistic contexts and only two retaining predominantly lexical meanings. The analysis further demonstrates that meanings of terms such as gyatt, rizz, sigma, and skibidi toilet are largely constructed through meme culture, digital intertextuality, and shared online experiences rather than through conventional dictionary definitions. These findings suggest Generation Alpha slang functions not merely as linguistic innovation but also as mechanism for identity construction, humor, social positioning, and community building within digital environments. The study concludes that semantic interpretation of Generation Alpha slang is highly contextual, dynamic, and culturally embedded, highlighting crucial role of digital culture in shaping contemporary patterns of youth communication.
Keywords: contextual meaning; generation alpha slang; lexical meaning; semantic analysis
Resita Indah Saputri· ANGLOPHONE: Journal of Engli...· 0 citations
This study examines the language and meaning systems of English proverbs about love, with an emphasis on how differences in meaning enhance their persuasive impact and beauty. Love is a common feeling shared by people everywhere, but in stories and sayings, it is often described using phrases that do not mean exactly what they say. This is done to clearly express deep social and emotional ideas. The research focuses on the issue of insufficient semanticaly quantitative analysis of how particular linguistic features—such as metaphor, oxymoron, and hyperbole—operate to fulfill unique semantic roles within the category of love proverbs. The study has two main goals: first, to recognize and group the most common types of semantic deviations found in English love proverbs; and second, to analyze how these deviations are communicated to the audience. The procedure included a quantitative examination of a carefully selected dataset containing fourteen English proverbs. These data were collected from different dictionaries and literary works, selecting information that relates to a general understanding of love, such as romantic, family, and friendly feelings. Based on the analytical frameworks proposed by Leech (1969) and Gibbons and Whiteley (2018), the researcher classified the proverbs into six main categories: metaphor (which includes personification), simile, metonymy (which includes synecdoche), tautology, hyperbole, and oxymoron. The results show that these changes in meaning enable proverbs to move beyond their direct interpretations, offering a deeper way to understand and express the various aspects of love, including its complexities, conflicts, and strong emotions, making it easier for both the speaker and the listener to grasp and remember.
GhufranSattar Jarad· Journal of the College of B...· 0 citations
This study investigates how English-language Twitter discourse surrounding the #MahsaAmini protests (October 2022–February 2023) organized into distinct yet interconnected thematic communities within civil society networks. Combining Louvain community detection, sentiment profiling (via VADER), and semantic validation (Jensen–Shannon Divergence, MANOVA, cosine similarity), we map five protest “streams” reflecting modular issue alignments, from Documentation of events involving violence and On-the-Ground Mobilization to Monarchist Advocacy & Diaspora Political Engagement and Anti-IRGC Campaigns. While these communities differ in topical focus, their shared affective tone and overlapping lexicons point to modular polyvocality, a discourse structure characterized by thematic differentiation within broader rhetorical and affective coherence. This pattern represents polyvocal consensus rather than fragmentation. We interpret these findings through the lens of connective action, networked publics, and digital diaspora activism, arguing that the discourse reflects a transnational, modular, and affectively aligned subset of protest-oriented civil society mobilization within constrained information environments. This work contributes to debates on hybrid dissent, algorithmic visibility, and the structure of protest discourse in controlled digital contexts.
H. Masoudnia, Alireza Samiee Esfahani, Mohsen Forghani et al.· Social science computer revi...· 0 citations
Drawing on 660 Web-of-Science articles, this study traces the 15-year trajectory of corpus pragmatics, which has grown into an increasingly influential field. Co-citation analysis and network mapping reveal that
Journal of Pragmatics
has remained the most influential journal throughout, while the impact of other pragmatics- and corpus-related journals has also significantly increased over time. Meanwhile, foundational works continue to be frequently cited, but more recent contributions highlight the emergence of new research themes. Besides, a diachronic keyword analysis also demonstrates growing interest in topics such as new types of speech acts (e.g., self-denigration and self-praise), pragmatic competence, and subfields like historical, diachronic, and variational pragmatics. The study concludes by urging richer linguistic diversity, multimodal annotation and deeper integration of emerging technologies to propel the field forward. Overall, the study provides a comprehensive overview of the field’s evolution and offers valuable insights for future research in corpus pragmatics.
Wei Wang, Xingbing Liu· International Review of Prag...· 0 citations
Taste words provide an important window into the interaction among embodied experience, cognitive mechanisms, and sociocultural factors in semantic change. From a cognitive linguistic perspective, this study investigates the major senses, diachronic relationships, and cognitive motivations of the adjective salty in American English. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) serves as the primary data source, supplemented by evidence from historical dictionaries. All instances of salty returned under the specified search conditions were collected and examined after proper names, duplicates, OCR errors, and contextually indeterminate cases had been excluded. The results show that the central meaning of salty is “containing salt” or “having a salty taste.” On this basis, the word has developed meanings associated with marine and coastal environments, sailors and maritime life, evaluations of speech and style, personal character and behavior, and emotional states such as annoyance, dissatisfaction, and resentment. These senses do not constitute a simple sequence in which one meaning replaces another; rather, they form a radial polysemy network in which older and newer senses coexist. The marine-environment sense is metonymically extended to sailors and their stereotypical characteristics, while the perceptual intensity of taste motivates metaphorical descriptions of vivid, pungent, blunt, or offensive language. Recurrent contextual inference from speech and behavioral evaluation further contributes to the conventionalization of the emotional sense. The semantic evolution of salty is therefore jointly motivated by embodied experience, conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, pragmatic inference, and sociocultural transmission.
Zhong-Yao Wang, Yu Wang· International Journal of Eng...· 0 citations
Languages are permanently expanding their vocabulary with new
words, which is an inevitable and constant process. The new words can be
produced by the means of one language, borrowed from a foreign language, or
created as a combination of one’s language means and borrowed elements.
These novel words appear for the first time mainly in the journalistic articles,
and then, depending on many factors, either spread into the general lexicon, or
remain a part of a specialized language. The research question relates to the
personal name-based neologisms in the Macedonian journalistic discourse
aiming to reveal the most frequent word formation devices journalists use
when creating such neologisms in their text. Thus, 2000 online news articles,
informative and opinion based, are selected by using personal name-based
neologisms as key words on Google Search. They serve as a sample, which is
purposeful and cohesive. The data analysis rests upon the general qualitative
inductive method and is enriched by the coding, i.e. organizational boxes are
established in which the data are sorted for further analysis. The research
results showcase that Macedonian journalistic discourse contains personal
name-based neologisms which support the view that they are a common
phenomenon in many modern languages. Further, the findings reveal that the
suffixation is the most frequent language means used by journalists when
generating personal name-based neologisms which reinforces previously
stated outcomes. Furthermore, from the results it is obvious that the new
personal name-based words are created with prefixes and that there are new
compounds as well. In addition, these answers unveil that the personal namebased neologisms assist in achieving stylistic expression of the journalists’ text.
Violeta Janusheva· Folia linguistica et littera...· 0 citations
