Tsygankova Z. Lexical Innovations in English Space of Postfeminist Novels at the Beginning of the 21st Century.

The study deals with research of new words in postfeminist literature at the beginning of the 21st century. On the basis of a great number of lexicographic sources and so-called qualitative papers, main criteria of determination of a new word and its volume have been given, differentiation between the notions "new words" (neologisms) and "nonce words" (author's neologisms) has been undertaken. Various ways of word building have been thoroughly considered. The most productive methods of new words formation are affixation (46 %) and word composition (27 %). Less productive are bounding (5.8 %), reduplication (3.2 %), conversion (2.6 %), shortening (1.2 %), artificial words (3.2 %), and transition of a proper name into a common one (2 %). We define a high productivity of prefixes from classical languages, such as super-, extra-, mega-, over-, mono-, which mainly create evaluative adjectives. Prefixes micro-, arch-, perma-, semi- are classified as less productive. Among suffixes we distinguish -er, -ie, -ness, which create new nouns, and -ish, -y, which are used to create adjectives. Among other formational elements we determine post-root (-fest, -phobe / -phobic, -free, -type) and pre-root (eco-, near-, self-) elements. Word composition is also productive in chick lit novels. The most productive models are N+PI - Adj, N+PII - Adj and models of attributive nouns: N+N, N+N+ed and Adj+N. Loan words comprise 5 % of all neologisms. European and Eastern languages are donors of foreign words. They mainly define names of food/meals and are characterized as exoticisms. Some examples of colloquial words are also fixed but they mostly have exceptional character. A large number of Gallicisms is considered as a peculiarity of chick lit novels.