Neologisms in Social Media-Based Political Discourse on Nigeria’s 2023 Presidential Election

Neologisms have been explored in varied contexts of language use. However, the use of corpus analytical tools in deconstructing politics-based neologisms still remains under-explored. Neologisms in social media-based discourse surrounding Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election were explored in this study to understand their structural patterns and their semantic and pragmatic implications. A one-million-word corpus was built using posts from Facebook, Nairaland, Twitter (now X), and WhatsApp between December 2022 and May 2023. WordSmith Tools was used for a Wordlist analysis and a combined structural, morpho-semantic, pragmatic, and critical discourse analysis of the identified neologisms was conducted. The results revealed a total of 70 neologisms in the corpus. While some have paradigmatic non-concatenative morphemic relations, others have syntagmatic concatenative relations. Most of the neologisms have negative semantic prosody and also perform the perlocutionary function of (de)marketing of political groups. The article concludes that corpus analytical tools play a major role in exploring social media-based political neologisms.