The interdisciplinary basis of linguistic hybridization (an analysis of the retro-component in English-language political media texts)

The article is devoted to hybridization as an object of linguistic study. Having originated from biology, through metaphorical rethinking the term “hybridization” was transferred to different humanitarian sciences, including linguistics. Despite the growing research interest in hybridization, its methodological status in linguistics has not been decided upon yet. The aim of the present article is to reveal the facilitators of hybridization in biology, philosophy, and linguistics which constitute its interdisciplinary basis. The facilitators are illustrated with the retro-component of modern political media discourse that was retrieved from over 500 English-language texts of Twitter posts published between 2010 and 2022 by British, American, and Canadian politicians and political organizations. The research material was analyzed with methods of linguistic, text and discourse analysis, yielding the following conclusions. First, there are facilitators that are common to the three sciences, which is probably a consequence of metaphorization as a universal means of term transfer. The common facilitators include discretion of the “parents” and absence of constraints on interaction, a pronounced need for hybridization, emergence of a new property, non-compositionality of the hybrid. Second, there are properties specific to linguistic hybridization. These are the presence of a minimal communicative context and discernable verbalized identities.