From the Fantastic to Computing Slang: A Corpus-Based Study of Troll in Recent American English

Abstract

[eng] Lexical and semantic change has long been studied by many researchers and, with the introduction of the internet in our lives, our language has been even more exposed to these changes. Many slang terms resulting from the use of this phenomenon have been studied and analyzed, one of them being troll. Although there have been some works carried out to study the perception of this words, some questions are yet to be answered such as which meaning is more frequent now or how is it that this change occurred. This paper studies troll in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) by creating a database with a total of 1738 tokens where they have been analyzed according to different variables. This has been done in order to prove whether the new slang term is more used than the already existing meaning attached to troll.