This paper aims to utilize Twitter as a corpus and examine the lifespan of semantic neologisms, and compare the results to previous studies concerning the lifespan of lexical neologisms. Lexical neologisms have been shown in previous research, for the most part, to be ephemeral, to follow a trend-like pattern with a rapid increase in usage followed by a consequent rapid decline. Occasionally though, a small number of lexical neologisms do become integrated into the lexicon. In this thesis, the use of five words that have recently shown semantic expansion was tracked on Twitter from 2007 to 2021. These words, which can be considered examples of slang, were selected due to their proximity to hip-hop and African American culture, both shown to be drivers of cultural and linguistic innovation. This paper hypothesizes that the semantic neologisms identified and analyzed below will follow a similar pattern to the lexical neologisms examined in previous studies. The findings of this paper support this hypothesis in that, like lexical neologisms, while most semantic neologisms do follow the typical trend-like pattern observed in lexical neologisms, a few semantic neologisms display staying power and possible integration into the lexicon.
