THE GLOBAL LANGUAGE MONITOR AS A MIRROR OF DYNAMICS OF THE ENGLISH LEXICAL SUBSYSTEM

The article presents an analytical survey of The Global Language Monitor (GLM), the project launched in 2003 as a platform for cataloguing the most popular English language units and annual release of the Top Words/Phrases/Names lists based on special criteria. The authors proceed from language comprehension as a complex dynamic self-developing system and look into The GLM materials as quite a reliable source of knowledge of the relevant trends in the evolution of the English lexis subsystem. Special attention is given to the GLM data for the previous three years (2016-2018).

Registering the most frequent words and word combinations on-line gives ground for making judgments not only on the wide public values and attractions, but also on significant socio-political, economic, culture-related tendencies promoted by English information space. The article notes that the selected data objectively reflect not so much the true state of things and people’s attitudes as the mode of presenting the said phenomena, events and individuals in information sources. Besides, the GLM contents can be useful for linguistic analysis proper, since they help to monitor lexical and structural innovations in English, some of them being exemplified herein. The authors argue that far from always do such words enter the language system, and qualify them as speech elements tending to transfer to the language system.

In conclusion the authors assert that projects like GLM, alongside more profound corpus studies, open up good prospects for investigating humanitarian issues of the global community and various impacts of information space thereon.

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