Iconicity in English literary neologisms

The article deals with literary neologisms that, being a part of a literary character’s artificial language, have to be made understandable for the reader. The study shows that R. Dahl in his book The BFG attains this purpose (consciously or unconsciously) by supplying motivation for the words in the BFG’s vocabulary and other features of his speech. The BFG’s syntax, morphology and phonetics are governed by the English language usage (sometimes non-standard and colloquial), which means they are motivated secondarily. Some of the lexical items, too, are coined with the help of secondary motivation. Most of them, though, are shown to be motivated primarily, with their sound form and meaning in close unconventional interrelation. This kind of relationship between the form and the meaning is typical for iconic language signs that are demonstrated to convey in the BFG’s speech concepts of size, iteration, positive or negative attitudes and various types of sounds. The results of the perception experiments with English and Russian participants reported in the article, on the one hand, prove the iconic character of (at least some) neologisms from the book and, on the other hand, supply examples of universal iconicity being restricted or modified by language specific factors.