Morphopragmatic analysis of the neologism bigodudista based on social media guidelines

Abstract

This article presents a morphopragmatic analysis of the neologism bigodudista as used in an audiovisual post published on TikTok, focusing on how the platform’s moderation policies shape the creation of this lexical formation. Morphopragmatics is primarily concerned with the pragmatic meanings systematically encoded in morphological operations. The study investigates how interlocutors are able to pragmatically recover the meaning of bigodudista and associate it with the term nazist. The theoretical framework draws on the works of Gonçalves (2002; 2016), Grice (2004), Dressler and Barbaresi (1994; 2015), Wilson (2008), among others. The methodology involves corpus collection, validation, and analysis of the neological units. The inference that bigodudista refers to the term nazist is made possible through a metonymic mechanism. From a paradigmatic lexical perspective, the speaker’s choice of the formation bigodudista emerges by analogy with other morphosemantically similar formations, reflecting the productivity of the schema [X -ist]. In such formations, the suffix -ist conveys the meaning of “a person who supports, sympathizes with, or adheres to X.” This lexical choice reflects a process of implicature insofar as the referent remains inferentially accessible to interlocutors even without being explicitly stated within the context of the discursive restrictions imposed by the platform.