COGNITIVE AND DISCURSIVE DIMENSIONS OF THE WORDS OF THE YEAR 2025

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenon of the “Words of the Year” 2025 as linguistic markers reflecting transformations in digital culture from both cognitive and discursive perspectives. The relevance of the study is determined by the growing role of neologisms in representing social, technological, and cultural changes occurring in the context of increasing digitalisation of society. Special attention is paid to the lexical units rage bait, AI companion, and metaverse, which were selected as Words of the Year by leading English-language lexicographic institutions and which represent different aspects of contemporary digital interaction.
The aim of the study is to identify the cognitive and discursive characteristics of the Words of the Year 2025 and to determine their role in shaping linguistic conceptualisations of digital culture. The object of the research comprises neologisms in contemporary English-language media lexicon that have acquired the status of Words of the Year. The subject of the study involves the cognitive-semantic, pragmatic, and discursive features of the lexical units rage bait, AI companion, and metaverse in contemporary English-language media discourse.
The research methodology includes discourse analysis, cognitive-semantic analysis, elements of corpus analysis, and contextual-interpretative methods, which allow for tracing the functioning of the selected lexical units across various media sources and communicative contexts.
Future research perspectives are associated with expanding corpus-based studies of digital culture neologisms, examining their interdiscursive adaptation, and conducting comparative analyses of Words of the Year across different languages and cultural contexts in order to identify global trends in linguistic evolution under conditions of digitalisation.