Compounding as a Morphological Process on TikTok

Abstract

This essay examines compounding as a morphological process in online platforms, focusing on TikTok, a social media site where users express their opinions about events and happenings in their community. Social media users have been found to coin new terms with connotations exclusive to online usage, which may seem odd to people who are not on social media. Thus, by looking at the morphological compositions and descriptions as well as the semantic implications of such compound words, this work takes a descriptive approach to studying the morphological process of compounds. Ten compound terms were chosen for a thorough in-depth analysis out of the thousands that were gathered for the study through user observation and extraction from posts, comments, captions, and hashtags. The results show that the compound words' semantic connotations are limited to online usage and effectively capture the language of social media in general and TikTok in particular.