COMPUTER NEOLOGISMS IN THE LANGUAGE OF GENERATIONS Y AND Z (EXEMPLIFIED BY MACMILLAN DICTIONARY.COM)

The article deals with a brief summary of the Generational Theory developed by the American researchers W. Strauss and N.
Howe where special attention is paid to the members of the generations Y and Z. A hypothesis about the speech features of the generations Y and Z is given: the representatives of these two generations, Y and Z, are actively used and subjected to modifications of computer vocabulary in their everyday speech, and, as a consequence, computer neologisms occupy a certain percentage of the lexical units of their language. The article provides definitions of the neologism of the "Dictionary of linguistic terms" by O. S. Akhmanova and "Big Encyclopedic Dictionary" edited by V. N. Yartseva. The author refers to the classification of neologisms by T. V. Popova. The analysis of 89 computer neologisms from the website Macmillan Dictionary.com is conducted. The author identifies 10 most common units (app, wiki, emoji, QR code, unfollow, vlog, Bitcoin, VoIP, cloud computing and trolling) using the method of quantitative comparison of the results of three search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. The conclusion about the total number of occurrences and up to date types of discourse for each of the analyzed units is made by the analysis of data obtained using two corpora - the British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Magazine and Academic are the most frequent types of discourse where each of the analyzed units is actualized. The hypothesis is confirmed.