Making the Old New Again : A Corpus Analysis of Semantic Change in Contemporary American English Slang

Abstract: This study used a combination of historical and contemporary corpora to investigate semantic change within the contemporary American English slang words swag, flex, and swole. This study involved two parts. First, it analyzed each slang term’s earlier morphological form through collocate and contextual analysis within the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Second, it examined each slang term’s contemporary use in context within the News on the Web (NOW) corpus. After a comparison of the conclusions drawn from each analysis, it was found that the word swag underwent the process of semantic change known as amelioration and the words flex and swole experienced metaphorization.