Lexical novelties in computer-mediated communication

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a lexical analysis of data extracted using a specific collocation window from the Janes and Kres corpora of Slovene. The results of the analysis are shown to be useful for the monitoring of lexical novelties in Slovene vocabulary and for updating dictionaries. The extracted data were compared with existing dictionaries of Slovene in terms of new vocabulary, typical collocations and phrases, as well as semantic shifts. Among other results, the linguistic analysis of the extracted collocations has demonstrated that contrastive comparison can be used to pinpoint the main characteristics and trends of lexical novelties, as well as to identify their problematic aspects, e.g. when lexical novelties – particularly if under the influence of foreign language elements – also bring changes in spelling and syntactic roles.