Transition, transmission, translation: compounding in the Digital age. A corpus-based reading of Anthropocene and its language cloud

Social and new media are increasingly relying on a new parlance, that is, a manner of speaking which is ‘natural’ to these synthetic environments. Among some of the recent coinages there are words such as ‘astroturfing’, ‘natural search results’, ‘server farms’, and the ‘cloud storage’ or simply ‘the cloud’, all entertaining a strong if complex relation with nature and/or the biological environment. The core questions being: What are the socio-cultural implications of new com-pounds, blends, and/or multiword sequences? Can lexical items, born out of socio-economic change, trace a specific persistent framing and/or worldview? Where are novel collocations (multiword expressions), blended words and compounds taking us ideologically, when they make us - to rephrase an often-quoted line by Lévi-Strauss (1962) - think (and talk) with animals and/or Nature? Among the samples, particular attention is devoted to the evolution of collocations and compounds based on the source word ‘cloud’ - e.g., from ‘cloud cover’ in meteorology to ‘cloud space’ in computing – compounding being considered «the universally fundamental word formation process» (LIBBEN 2006: 2) and one of the most productive types in English anyway (ALGEO 1991). A corpus-based approach is adopted to analyse com-pounding and read frequency shifts across different corpora within different genre and discourse domains, thus letting us observe what combined forms under inves-tigation give priority to, i.e., ‘cloud computing’ against ‘cloud cover’ or ‘cloud for-mation/pollution’.