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Description
This paper examines how discourse lexicography can be extended to the study of contemporary neologisms, particularly those emerging from major societal crises such as COVID-19, climate change, energy shortages, migration, inflation and the war in Ukraine. Traditional discourse lexicography has mainly focused on historically controversial terms and has typically relied on selected textual sources rather than large-scale corpora. In contrast, the paper argues for a corpus-assisted discourse-analytic approach that systematically captures the semantic, evaluative and ideological dimensions of newly coined and borrowed lexical items. Particular attention is paid to features such as semantic prosody, affective meaning, stance-taking, politicisation and power relations, which often become entrenched in neologisms and shape their use in public discourse. The paper introduces the German neologism resource IDS $Neo^{2020+}$, which combines two complementary levels of consultation: detailed lexical entries for individual neologisms and broader discourse or cluster entries that trace thematic developments and discourse networks over time. Both entry types are interconnected. This dual structure allows users to explore both the meanings of specific new words/expressions and their wider discursive functions and relations with other new terms within public communication. The paper also outlines the corpus-linguistic and computational methods used in the project, including word embeddings.