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- Volume 25, Issue 1, 2018
Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 25, Issue 1, 2018
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From speaker innovation to lexical change
Author(s): Terttu Nevalainenpp.: 8–29 (22)More LessAbstractApplying a sociolinguistic approach to the study of neologisms, this paper discusses the actuation and diffusion of new words in Early Modern English (EModE; 1500–1700) and draws some parallels with word coining in the comparable but more recent period of Early Modern Finnish (EModF; 1810–1880). The success of this exercise ultimately depends on the data and tools available for ascertaining the status of neologisms in a broader synchronic and diachronic context. The use of historical dictionaries and digital databases shows that many words that were earlier considered particular innovations in EModE are now up for re-evaluation. Determining their actual moments of coinage and entry into the language may be beyond historical lexicology and lexicography, but the new tools make it possible to better monitor their provenance and process of diffusion over time.
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Explorations into the social contexts of neologism use in early English correspondence
Author(s): Tanja Säily, Eetu Mäkelä and Mika Hämäläinenpp.: 30–49 (20)More LessAbstractThis paper describes ongoing work towards a rich analysis of the social contexts of neologism use in historical corpora, in particular the Corpora of Early English Correspondence, with research questions concerning the innovators, meanings and diffusion of neologisms. To enable this kind of study, we are developing new processes, tools and ways of combining data from different sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary, the Historical Thesaurus, and contemporary published texts. Comparing neologism candidates across these sources is complicated by the large amount of spelling variation. To make the issues tractable, we start from case studies of individual suffixes (-ity, -er) and people (Thomas Twining). By developing tools aiding these studies, we build toward more general analyses. Our aim is to develop an open-source environment where information on neologism candidates is gathered from a variety of algorithms and sources, pooled, and presented to a human evaluator for verification and exploration.
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Lexical change often begins and ends in semantic peripheries
Author(s): Susanne Vejdemopp.: 50–85 (36)More LessAbstractThe article discusses semantic change and lexical replacement processes in the color domain, based on color naming studies in seven Germanic languages (where diachronic intra-linguistic development is inferred from cross-linguistic synchronic studies) and from different generations of speakers in a single language (Swedish). Change in the color domain often begins and ends in conceptual peripheries, and I argue that this perspective is suitable for other semantic domains as well.
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Acceptability and diffusion of luxury Anglicisms in present-day Romanian
Author(s): Anabella-Gloria Niculescu-Gorpin and Monica Vasileanupp.: 86–121 (36)More LessAbstractIn the context of the current heated debate surrounding the pervasive influence of the English language and Anglo-American culture on other languages, as well as the widespread purist attitude towards some contact-induced language change phenomena, both abroad and in Romania, our article discusses the situation of English lexical borrowings in present-day Romanian, focusing on the perception and processing of the so-called luxury Anglicisms (Sections 2 and 3) by young Romanian native speakers, in an attempt to see whether such an analysis can help clarify their acceptability and diffusion across our target population. We propose an alternative cognitive, psycholinguistic approach to the study of contact-induced lexical borrowings, aiming to show that there is no difference in the young Romanian native speakers’ processing of sentences containing luxury Anglicisms and their established Romanian counterparts. Such findings may support our claim that the acceptability and diffusion of such Anglicisms are pervasive across our target population, even if the official position generally condemns such uses, considering them gratuitous and a burden in communication, even making it unintelligible sometimes.
Our analysis starts from the observation that most (but not all) Romanian academics, whether linguists or not, tend to embrace a purist attitude, while on the other hand young Romanians accept such Anglicisms and tend to use them extensively. In fact, such uses are not limited to young people, who have been the subjects of our research, but are the ‘norm’ in daily conversations and elsewhere across the general population (Stoichițoiu Ichim 2006). Thus, there seems to be a gap between the actual acceptability and diffusion of luxury Anglicisms among Romanians and the ‘official’ recommendations. Based on the results of a sensicality task, meant to show how 188 Romanians, aged 18–22, process and perceive sentences with or without luxury Anglicisms (see Section 6), we will try to show that luxury Anglicisms are accepted and, by recurrent use, diffused among the Romanian community. For a more accurate picture of their diffusion, the findings will be further correlated with data from CoRoLa, the only official corpus of present-day Romanian (beginning 1989) made available under the auspices of the Romanian Academy, as well as a corpus currently in the making, and the Internet (see Section 7).
Besides showing that luxury Anglicisms cannot really be blamed for burdening or impairing processing, and thus communication, and explaining why such uses should not be censured or disapproved, we hope that our study of acceptability and diffusion will demonstrate that we are dealing with a complex, multi-layered phenomenon that can be better understood by going beyond a diachronic and synchronic analysis of particular words and a frequency count, and should incorporate more experimental data.
Last but not least, we suggest that, on the practical side, such experimental studies as the one described here could be used as an additional criterion for the lexicographic inclusion of lexical borrowings.
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Metalinguistic comments and signals
Author(s): Jan Svanlundpp.: 122–141 (20)More LessAbstractMany neologies receive a large amount of metalinguistic focus during their conventionalization. This includes explicit metalinguistic comments, as well as several ways of emphasizing a new word qua word in running texts, so-called metasignals (e.g., quotation marks). This article reports from a large quantitative study of 360 Swedish neologies. It investigates the nature and the amount of metafocus during conventionalization. More than 96% of the neologies received metafocus at least once, but the mean proportion of metafocused citations was low, just under 3.5%. Metafocusing is likely to be more intense in early phases and is likely to decline over time. No long-term effects of metafocusing on the conventionalization process itself were found in corpus data.
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Cognitive constraints in English lexical blending
Author(s): Daniel Kjellanderpp.: 142–173 (32)More LessAbstractThe complex characteristics of lexical blending have long troubled mainstream word formation research to the extent that it has typically been considered a peripheral issue in linguistics. In recent years this has begun to change, and there is currently a growing body of evidence uncovering the intriguing nature of this word formation process. In the present study, underlying principles and usage-based aspects of lexical blends were examined. Analyses of derivatives of three matrix words, republican, liberal, and vegetarian, revealed the impact of three cognitive constraints on the use of lexical blends: schema transfer effects, neighborhood effects, and effects of the influence from morphological lexicalization. The first constraint fueled blend formation, while the other two displayed a hampering effect on the use of lexical blending. Furthermore, a study of the word class distribution in the datasets showed that there were significant differences in the grammar of lexical blending and compounding, respectively.
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Using data-mining to identify and study patterns in lexical innovation on the web
Author(s): Daphné Kerremans, Jelena Prokić, Quirin Würschinger and Hans-Jörg Schmidpp.: 174–200 (27)More LessAbstractThis paper presents the NeoCrawler – a tailor-made webcrawler, which identifies and retrieves neologisms from the Internet and systematically monitors the use of detected neologisms on the web by means of weekly searches. It enables researchers to use the web as a corpus in order to investigate the dynamics of lexical innovation on a large-scale and systematic basis. The NeoCrawler represents an innovative web-mining tool which opens up new opportunities for linguists to tackle a number of unresolved and under-researched issues in the field of lexical innovation. This paper presents the design as well as the most important characteristics of two modules, the Discoverer and the Observer, with regard to the usage-based study of lexical innovation and diffusion.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 31 (2024)
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Volume 30 (2023)
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Volume 29 (2022)
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Volume 28 (2021)
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Volume 27 (2020)
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Volume 26 (2019)
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Volume 25 (2018)
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Volume 24 (2017)
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Volume 23 (2016)
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Volume 22 (2014)
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Volume 21 (2013)
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Volume 20 (2012)
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Volume 19 (2011)
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Volume 18 (2010)
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Volume 17 (2009)
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Volume 16 (2008)
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Volume 15 (2007)
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Volume 14 (2006)
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Volume 13 (2005)
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Volume 12 (2004)
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Volume 11 (2003)
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Volume 10 (2002)
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Volume 9 (2001)
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Volume 8 (2000)
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Volume 7 (1999)
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Volume 6 (1998)
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Volume 5 (1997)
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Volume 4 (1996)
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Volume 3 (1995)
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Volume 2 (1994)
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Volume 1 (1993)
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