• DOI:10.1075/SCL.57.14REN
• Corpus ID: 16681075

A finer definition of neology in English: The life-cycle of a word

@inproceedings{Renouf2013AFD,
  title={A finer definition of neology in English: The life-cycle of a word},
  author={Antoinette Renouf},
  year={2013}
}

• Antoinette Renouf
• Published 2013
• Linguistics

It has been shown (Renouf, 1993a) that lexical and semantic neology can be identified in a text corpus at surface level by automatic means. Ac cording to hypotheses upheld, a lexical neologism is often a lexical item which occurs for the first time in a diachronic corpus of journalism; and found automatically by comparing ea ch word in a stream of fresh corpus data with a baseline index, such that each previously un see item is deemed to be a candidate neologism. Meanwhile, a semantic neologism has been shown to be identifiable through the change in the word‘s collocational environment (Ren ouf, 1993b). Most neologisms, once recorded, never reappear in t he corpus, while others remain. In this paper, we examine the changing status of neologisms across time, tracking the ‘life-cycle‘ of a word (Renouf, 2007), from its first appearance in our text, through its fluctuations in frequency and popularity, to its possible assimilat ion into mainstream language, to its possible death and re-birth. For convenience, we use the term ‘word’ as generic fo all neologistic formations, though of course these may take the form of a simplex or comp lex word, or a multi-word unit of incipient or established fixedness. The study will be based on a corpus of 1.2 billion words of UK mainstream newspaper text covering the period 1989-2011.