The main objective of this paper is to show how important fashionable words and/or combining words such as eco- can be in the development of one language’s vocabulary, in our case the English vocabulary. The study area is linguistics: the paper presents an analysis of the English vocabulary of the compounds with eco- . The method consists of the statistical analysis of the eco- words: share of the modern English vocabulary, structure of the compounds, parts of speech containing eco- , and share of hyphenated words with eco- . The results of our analysis show that English eco- words advertising Indian eco-tourism, for instance, are twice as numerous as English eco- words attested by language dictionaries. The conclusion: though quite recent, this hybrid vocabulary is likely to prevail in the field of the ever-developing eco-tourism.

attested eco- words; structure of compounds; base word; novelty

Presentation: oral