Different word formation processes occurring on Twitter regarding the discourse of Taylor Swift's "Midnights" album (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Flensburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: #subtweeting or @menexttime: Word Formation Processes on Social Media Platforms, language: English, abstract: In this paper, different word formation processes used by Twitter users, specifically Taylor Swift fans, will be analyzed. Unsurprisingly, as there are millions of tweets regarding this discourse, the chosen tweets are only a small selection but they should be able to give an overview. Since a lot of the fans are very passionate about Swift-related content, it is expected to find various forms of newly shaped word formations. In addition, it is probable that especially the replies to impressive milestones and successes of the singer, as well as tweets talking about the new songs will be filled with a lot of emotional utterances in which one can find different practices of word formation processes.

Twitter is a social media platform where a lot of fans come together to talk about their favorite artist. Especially singer and songwriter Taylor Swift accumulates many fans, who frequently tweet about her and her music on the platform. They share their opinions, thoughts and excitement through the short postings. Moreover, the announcement and release of Swift's tenth studio album Midnights are catalysts for many new tweets and therefore new word formations.

Naturally, one can find a lot of different word formation processes in these tweets as Twitter is a mostly text-based social media platform. It isn't the pictures or videos that are the main corpus of Twitter but rather short texts that often have a humorous aspect to them. Due to the characteristics of the platform, like the 280-character tweet limit or the ability to post many different tweets within a short period of time, many shortening word formation processes like blending, acronyms and clippings can be found. But also the consistent interactions between the fans talking about different songs or theories tend to cause new word formations by creating new compounds, conversions or derivations.