The goal of this master’s thesis is to describe the use and meaning of selected neologisms in the German language, using a corpus-based approach. In the theoretical part of the master’s thesis the German vocabulary, words as linguistic signs and words as social and cultural phenomenons are presented. Further on the definition of neologism, its characteristics and types as well as the terms „word career” and “semantic drift” are described. In the next chapter the field of corpus linguistics, the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) with its functions and the long term project of Dictionary of German Neologisms (Neologismenwörterbuch) are presented.
In the empirical part six neologisms from the German language have been chosen for the analysis – three from the field of politics (Willkommenskultur, Teuro, No-go-Area) and three from the field of technology (Surfer, Trojaner, chatten). In the empirical part of the thesis we will first state and compare the meanings of each neologism in three different German dictionaries (Duden-Online, DWDS and Neologismenwörterbuch). The German Reference Corpus DeReKo serves as the basis for further corpus-based analysis. The data can be structured as to their date of appearance, appearance in relation to topics and German speaking countries. In order to discover in which contexts (thematic discourse such as politics, economy etc.) and with which words a neologism is commonly used, the co-occurrence analysis was used.
Since neologisms change and make our language richer, we should not ignore them in any way. That is why the aim of the analysis is to show and describe the use as well as the meaning of neologisms with the help of a corpus-based analysis.
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