Comprehensive Study of Neologisms in the Modern Georgian Language and Monitoring their Emergence with Digital Methods
Changes, taking place in a language are usually very slow and difficult to notice. These changes occur over long periods of time before they become perceptible on a synchronic level. But there are exceptions from this general tendency and the contemporary Georgian language is a very good example of this. After the collapse of the former Soviet Union, our country saw great changes in all spheres of our life, which results, on the one hand, in the introduction into the Georgian language of the concepts, words and terms reflecting new realities of life and, on the other hand, the influx of foreign borrowed words. These processes are only intensified by the increasing availability of computer, telecommunication and cellular technologies. Consequently, all prerequisites are in place which can cause substantial changes in the Georgian lexis and even morphology. Thus, the detection and study of latent diachronic processes taking place in the Georgian language becomes particularly interesting at this linguistic-historical moment, moreover as our studies have revealed, new vocabulary is not attested in Georgian explanatory or bilingual dictionaries. The observation of gradual hidden changes occurring in a language is made easier by modern technologies. Vast electronic text corpora, specialized computer software, NLP methods allow us to subject huge amounts of language material to various kinds of classification, statistical analysis and study. These considerations prompted us to embark upon the proposed project.
The study is based on the combination of several approaches. This is the application of the lemmatization tool for the Georgian language developed at Ilia State University, which is based on the vocabulary from existing academic dictionaries; searching neologism candidates in out-of-vocabulary lexis; comparison and collation of word lists from the new corpus, compiled by us, with the word lists of the Georgian National Corpus, e.i. comparison of word lists from new and comparatively old corpora, etc.
The proposed project envisages the following outcomes: (1) publication of an article dedicated to the project in peer-reviewed foreign and/or local scientific journal(s); (2) compilation of an electronic explanatory dictionary of Georgian neologisms; (3) defense of a doctoral thesis within the framework of the project by the young researcher, project participant; (4) presentation of the results of the research conducted within the framework of the project at an international event abroad, as well as an international event in Georgia; (5) development of a website, which will monitor neologisms in the modern Georgian language.
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