Контаминантные окказионализмы в российском медиа-дискурсе

Blend words in the Russian press

The purpose of the present study is to detect and describe such lexical units as nonce words, in particular blend words used in Russian magazine and newspaper articles. These lexical units are directly relating to word creativity in mass media. The article also reviews critearia of distinction between neologisms and nonce words. The research is based on the pragmatic and linguistic and stylistic analysis of Russian magazine and newspaper articles. The result of the study is summarized as follows. First, the language of the press now is predominantly expression of author’s opinion – oriented. Second, for the reason contemporary journalists use slang, jargon, obscene language as well as new vocabulary formed out of slang and jargon units the language of the press is emotional and expressive and is similar to colloquial speech. Third, blending plays a great role as a word-building model in the formation of lexical units of the contemporary Russian press. The blends are result of paronymic attraction that is the distorting effect exerted on a word by one of its paronyms. Deformed (as it is termed in Russian linguistics) idioms that are widely used in newspaper and magazine headlines serve as a source of phraseological blends. The popularity of blending can be explained by the impact it produces as well as its capacity to convey the author’s ideas in a compressive way.