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Article published In: The Dynamics of Lexical Innovation: Data, methods, models
Edited by Daphné Kerremans, Jelena Prokić, Quirin Würschinger and Hans-Jörg Schmid
[Pragmatics & Cognition 25:1] 2018
► pp. 30–49

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Explorations into the social contexts of neologism use in early English correspondence

 | University of Helsinki
 | University of Helsinki
 | University of Helsinki
Published online: 12 June 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.18001.sai
Abstract
This 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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Corpora of Early English Correspondence (CEEC)
  • 3.Two case studies of specific types of neologisms: -ity and -er
    • 3.1Case study 1: -ity
    • 3.2Case study 2: -er
  • 4.Towards computational discovery of neologisms in general
    • 4.1Case study 3: Thomas Twining
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (27)
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Kerremans, Daphné, Jelena Prokić, Quirin Würschinger & Hans-Jörg Schmid
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Nevalainen, Terttu
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