Funcionamento dos neologismos em rede social: análise de tweets sobre a Copa do Mundo de 2022.

Abstract

To think about society’s evolution and about the new technologies that go along with it is intrinsically tied to thinking about the evolution of communication and of the changes undergone by language in this process. The World Cup, in turn, is an event that happens every four years, but that, during its execution, promotes a considerable atmosphere of interest, getting to reunite millions of viewers at the same time throughout the planet. From that, we consider this event as a fortunate moment to research and understand the new ways by which people communicate, which also implies being aware of movements that might become relevant in our language in the future. From modern enthusiasm with social media, we observe the communication dynamics that compose the interactive atmosphere in digital spaces and we propose ourselves a better understanding of creation and functioning of neologisms used in social media, more specifically on Twitter, from an explanatory, qualitative and documental research. For a clearer and more precise analysis, we start by classifying neologisms published on Twitter during the 2022 World Cup; then, we follow with an explanation of contextual and meaning relations involved in creating those neologisms; and, finally, we analyze the meanings perceived by the interlocution of these words. In order to carry out this work, we support this research with the theoretical postulations of Carvalho (2006), Kehdi (2003), and Correia and Almeida (2012), elucidating conceptions of neologisms and terminology creation adopted here; mainly, we use Recuero (2011) in order to understand the dynamics of language functioning in the interactive action of social media. Cavalcante (2012) and Marcuschi and Koch (2006) have helped us in perceiving how these neologisms act on discourse. Our research corpus is constituted of social media posts and comments on the common theme, the World Cup, and, through our theoretical input, we have established three categories of analysis which encompass the main functions of neologism in these posts: neologism in the creation of the subject’s positive image; neologism in the creation of the subject’s negative image; and neologism in the posts’ humorous composition, and engaging tool. Thus, we have studied in which way interlocutors have received these neologisms, attesting if those could be productive words in the function of interaction and perpetuation.