1
DIPARTIMENTO DI
FILOLOGIA, LETTERATURA E LINGUISTICA
CORSO DI LAUREA IN LINGUE, LETTERATURE E FILOLOGIE EUROAMERICANE
TESI DI LAUREA
The innovative nature of teen talk:
a focus on neologisms through a corpus-assisted study of teen TV series
CANDIDATO RELATORE
Jessica Louise Volpe Prof.ssa Silvia Bruti CORRELAORE
Dott. Gianmarco Vignozzi
2
Adolescents are the linguistic movers and shakers […], and as such, a prime source of information about linguistic change and the role of language in social practice.
3
Table of contents
0. INTRODUCTION………..………..6 1. TEEN TALK………….………...………..9 1.1 A definition of youth………...……..9
1.2 Youth and identity………...10
1.3 Innovation through the linguistic variable………...13
1.4 What is so innovative about teen talk? ………....14
2. NEOLOGISMS………...16
2.1 A definition……….…17
2.2 The life circle of neologisms………...……19
2.3 Neologisms in time……….…22
2.3.1 The English language as a borrower………23
2.3.2 Literary contributions……….26
2.4 The creation of neologisms………...……….29
2.4.1 Creating ………30 2.4.2 Borrowing………...……..31 2.4.2.1 Simple loanwords………..………33 2.4.2.2 Adopted loanwords……….…..34 2.4.2.3 Loan translations………..……35 2.4.3 Combining………..…..36 2.4.4 Shortening……….37 2.4.5 Blending………...…….39 2.4.6 Shift in meaning………40
4
2.5 Neologisms today………...…42
2.5.1 Influence from the internet………...…..42
2.5.2 Influences from our globalised world ………..46
2.5.3 Teen talk slang contribution………...49
3. TOWARDS A CORPUS-ASSISTED STUDY OF AMERICAN TEEN TALK………53
3.1 Planned and unplanned speech……….53
3.2 Television dialogue………...…..54
3.3 TV series transcripts as a mirror of spontaneous speech …...55
3.4 A corpus-assisted study……….…….58
3.5 The creation of the American Teen corpus………...………60
3.6 An overview of the SydTV corpus ………64
4. NEOLOGISMS IN THE AT CORPUS……… ………….66
4.1 Neologisms concerning drugs………..….67
4.2 Neologisms in love and sex teen slang………..…75
4.3 Neologisms from the Millennial Age………87
4.4 Neologisms from borrowings………...…..100
4.4.1 Borrowings of Italian origin………..…..102
4.4.2 Borrowings of Spanish origin ………..………..107
4.4.3 Borrowings of French origin……….…………..111
4.5 Neologisms in hyperbolic talk ……….…114
4.5.1 Freaking………..117
4.5.2 Totally……….…….122
5
6. REFERENCES ……….…....136
6.1 Bibliography……….136
6.2 Web references……….…144
APPENDIX 1. Summary of the meanings of the new words and/or uses……….……….148
APPENDIX 2. Normalised frequency rates of the neologisms in the AT corpus and SydTV corpus………...………..154
List of Charts
Chart 1. Frequency of drug-related neologisms………....………69Chart 2. Frequency of love and sex neologisms………..77
Chart 3. Frequency of technological neologisms………...88
Chart 4. Frequency of new loanwords………..………102
Chart 5. Frequency and uses of freaking…...………...122
6 0. INTRODUCTION
Teenagers have always been different from their parents, creating a generation gap which is, probably, never going to be compensated. This discrepancy mainly depends on their age, on the fact that they still need to structure their personality and identity. Youth is a journey from childhood to adulthood, where many things, undoubtedly, undergo a transformation. Indeed, this metamorphic phase teenagers experience makes them different from adults in the way they express, with an influence on what they wear, how they behave and, acutely, the way they speak. In fact, teenagers use a personal way of communicating, which generally differs from standard norms, mainly for two reasons: firstly, because adolescents strive to be accepted and appreciated by their peer group, and to do so, they choose to adopt a trendy way of speaking; secondly, because their rebellious attitude influences their will to separate from their parents and adults in general, often seen as authorities that could limit their uniqueness. In other words, their identities are intimately linked with politics of inclusion, exclusion and strategic self- and other- positioning. (Androutsopoulos, Georgakopoulou 2003: 2) and, as Hudson states, “it is the peer-oriented stage which lays the basis for the adult language” (Stenström, Jørgensen, 2009: 1).
Hence, the language of the young is where linguistic innovations first appear: their attitude makes them express in a peculiar way, to the extent that they could be considered the flagship for future language development. In other words, teen talk represents a preview of how language will evolve: firstly, because teens will be the adults of our foreseeable future, and secondly, because their will to distance themselves from the standard creates new uses of the language, which often spread, influencing its norms and, mostly, its vocabulary.
7
The purpose of my study is mainly two-fold: firstly, to analyse and classify one of the most interesting features of teen talk, neologisms; secondly, to demonstrate how the use and frequency of neologisms is pervasive in a purpose-built corpus of American teen TV series, including the first three seasons of 13 Reasons Why, Riverdale and Atypical: de facto, television dialogue can, to some extent, be taken as a mirror of spontaneous speech and conversational dynamics, although planned in advance.
Firstly, I identified a selection of words while watching the three series, since I realised American teenagers used a register that I, at times, found hard to understand: many of the uttered words and their uses sounded new to my ear, despite my half-English side. This made me realise how quickly language actually changes, since the English my mother taught me less than 30 years ago, is already something of the past, while giving way to new expressions and language uses promoted by teenagers.
Following an outline on the innovative nature of teen language in the first chapter, a focus on neologisms is carried out in chapter two, describing their creation, the causes behind it and their lifespan, also providing an overview of different typologies, by following Algeo’s classification (1991).
In chapter three, the process that took to the creation of the purpose-built corpus of American teen TV series - henceforth the
American Teen corpus - is described, such as the reasons which took
to the choice of the SydTV corpus in representation of adult talk. Subsequently, the methodology adopted for this study is illustrated, together with the essential tools which were adopted for the Corpus Linguistics analysis.
The analysis of these neologisms is carried out in chapter four, by comparing them with data from the SydTV corpus assembled by Monika Bednarek, which intended to demonstrate how teen talk
8
consistently differs from adult talk in terms of the innovative use of vocabulary. The study was carried out by using the freeware toolkits for Corpus Analysis: as far as the American Teen corpus is concerned,
AntConc provided a base for the study of the lexemes’ frequencies and
uses, while also following the directions given by Anthony (2004); as regards the SydTV corpus, the online access to the corpus through https://www.syd-tv.com/ resulted in a useful tool, especially for the analysis of frequency rates.
In the conclusive part, I firstly underline how the words teens use importantly characterise their identities: indeed, the cryptic and creative language they use, also influenced by the exposure to a wider range of language behaviours coming from social networks and new arising realities of our globalised world, characterises them as the “shakers of the English language” (Eckert, 1997: 57). Finally, I summarise the results found in chapter 4, once more stressing the difference between teen and adult talk.
9
1. TEEN TALK
1.1 A definition of youth
Following the definition of the New Oxford Dictionary of English, youth can be, albeit vaguely, defined as “the period between childhood and adult age”, a social organisation within an age-span which ranges from late childhood, over to the core phase of adolescence and up to post-adolescence, commonly the early twenties’ (Anroutsopoulos, Georgkopoulou, 2003: 6).
Put differently, it is a transitional phase strictly seen in relation to what needs to be interpreted as respectively childish and adult, a blurred pathway which takes young people from one sharply defined life stage to another. The path’s start and finish lines are vague, and its boundaries are not defined: in fact, these depend firstly on the person’s life experience and maturity, which can influence the end of childhood or the beginning of adulthood; secondly and more importantly, they depend on culture-specific terms: in fact, in some cultures, the notion of adolescence hardly exists, while in others, culturally-defined rites of passage clearly mark where childhood ends and adulthood begins. It could also be added that the general tendency at the turn of the 20th century is that puberty is beginning progressively earlier while the move into independent adulthood is delayed, making this period broader (Androutsopoulos, Georgakopoulou, 2003: 173). On the one hand, this depends on our frenetic world, which makes children grow out of their infancy very soon due, on top of all, due to the influences of the widespread media and the internet in general, which constantly bombard their childish brains with gown-up information and content. On the other, adulthood is delayed as young people tend to stay in parental homes until their mid-twenties, due to social and economic reasons. Therefore, youth is indeed an age-dependent phase with its
10
own specific norms of physical, sexual and mental development, but it also needs to be defined as a social and cultural construction, bounded by a range of other indicators, such as financial dependency, responsibility and emotional reliance on primary caregivers which vary considerably across cultures and contexts (Dunne et al, 2015: 299-316).
As a consequence, this flowing period has influence on how adolescents behave, think and speak, while they strive to find their identity and affirm themselves as individuals who need to be appreciated by their peers and differ from the adult world.
To summarise, youth is a fluid phase of mankind, which elapses between childhood and adulthood, with specific characteristics which depend on the influences of the internal and external world: indeed, adolescents are in transition mentally and emotionally, as well as capturing external stimuli and assimilating them to construct their own identity.
1.2 Youth and identity
Young people are in a transitional phase in which they need to define who they actually are and want to be. In other words, of vital importance for teenagers is to create their own identity, which Merriam
Webster defines as “the qualities and beliefs that make a particular
person or group different form others”.
The concept of identity is, fundamentally, a paradox: in fact, by analysing this lexeme of Latin roots evolving from idem meaning ‘the same’, we realise it also implies the concept of ‘different’; in fact, on the one hand, identity means being different from the rest to affirm one’s singularity while, on the other, it implies a relationship of sameness with a broader collective or social group, as individuals
11
constantly seek the identification with those who have similar ways of thinking, talking or behaving (Buckingham, 2008: 1). As Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou claim:
“identities […] are intimately linked with politics of inclusion, exclusion and more or less strategic self- and other-positionings”. (2003: 2)
In fact, during adolescence, the individual overcomes uncertainty, becoming more self-aware of both strengths and weaknesses, and gains confidence of own unique qualities; nonetheless, this achievement also depends on the interaction with peers and caregivers, as identity also needs to be negotiated with others (Bukingham, 2008: 3).
As far as the affirmation of youth identity is concerned, Erikson (1968) extends Piaget’s studies on adulthood and old age, analysing various stages of adolescence and viewing each stage in life as characterised by a fundamental psychological conflict, whose successful resolution allows progression to the next stage: in the case of adolescence, the conflict is between identity and role confusion. By solving this conflict, teenagers find a settled role in life, which results in the formation of a ‘virtue’, also defined as a form of psychological strength, being, in this case, loyalty or fidelity. This new epiphany enables the young person to progress to early adulthood, and to form the intimate attachments that are the key task of that stage. Therefore, teenagers need to know who they are to progress, having the objective of feeling different from the ones they judge as authority while, at the same time, looking out for inspiration from their peers.
This quest for identity involves structuring a personal way of being through clothing, appearance, preferences in music and through language, an essential means to show who they are and where they belong (Androutsopoulos, Georgakopoulou, 2003: 256).
By following the linguistic variable, according to Labov’s definition, two or more ways of saying the same thing (Hazen, 2002:
12
36), teens often choose to use the most innovative and groovy terms, in order to be different from their parents and be appreciated by their peers. In particular, they make use of many non-standard features of language, mostly derived from their exposure to different realities and situations.
Firstly, teens are influenced by school, play groups and friends: in fact, each experience they have adds up to their identity construction, as being with their peer group, their enemies and their lover, aids the individual in the search for a personal identity, since all these contacts provide both a role model and a special social feedback (Androutsopoulos, Georgakopoulou, 2003: 102).
Secondly, our millennial age has an important impact on teenagers, as the time they pass on the net brings them in constant contact with numerous realities, which inevitably influence the way they think and speak. According to Buckingham (2008: 14), technology could be also seen as a force of liberation for young people, as it makes them overcome the influence of the adults around them, escaping in their own worlds and creating new, autonomous forms of communication, also allowing them to become more creative and more innovative than their parents. Therefore, teenagers could be defined as ‘pastiche identities’, who are:
constantly borrowing bits and pieces of identity from whatever sources are available and constructing them as useful or desirable in a given situation’. (Androutsopoulous, Georgakopoulou, 2003: 132)
To summarise, thanks to peculiar linguistic choices, teenage talk represents innovation and change, while adolescents should be considered “the linguistic movers and shakers, and as such, a prime source of information about linguistic change” (Eckert, 1997: 57).
13
1.3 Innovation through the linguistic variable
People regularly make word choices when they speak: these alternatives or, as Labov defines them “alternative means of saying the same thing” (Hazen, 2002: 36) are known as linguistic variables in variationist sociolinguistics. They follow the compatibility function despite admitting rather fuzzy boundaries, an example being that the chosen word needs to ‘fit’ that specific space in the sentence without sounding too awkward (Zadeh, 1975: 198). In particular, this variant can concern different ways of pronouncing the same word, as with data which can be pronounced as DAY-tuh or DAH-tuh, or different ways of calling the same concept, an example being the choice between hi,
hello, hey in greetings (Tagliamonte, 2016: 45).
The totality of values of a linguistic variable constitutes its ‘term-set’, which could have, in principle, an infinite number of elements (Zadeh, 1975: 201) with boundaries following approximate reasoning. An example of the term-set of appearance is made below:
T (Appearance): beautiful + very attractive + pretty + cute +
attractive + quite pretty + not very pretty +…
Generally, the choices teenagers make when speaking are considerably different from the adults’ ones, often challenging the rules of the standard, while presenting their own creative ways of expression, especially for what concerns vocabulary. In fact, by selecting one word instead of another, teens contribute to affirm their identities, making all the effort both to be appreciated by their peers for their trendy ways of talking and to distance themselves from adults’ canonical language.
14
1.4 What is so innovative about teen talk?
Teenagers are frequently responsible for linguistic innovation and changes which are, on some occasions, incorporated into the general structure of the language over time (Martìnez, 2011: 106). Indeed, teens will be, together with their peculiar way of expressing, the adults of the foreseeable future and, on the other hand, are already a potential source of inspiration of adult language. In other words, new linguistic tendencies are generally first noticed in teen talk, and these new uses, in some cases, spread among others, entering English, and sometimes influencing durable language change.
Teen language should be regarded as a general umbrella term, incorporating many varieties, differing from one another for personal, social, geographical and situational variables, with the age factor being the common discriminator, which distances them from adults (Martìnez, 2011, 106). In other words, teen talk could be considered as one of the several indicators of a rebellious attitude with the aim of reinforcing a distance from the adult world (Stenström, 2014: 19). Therefore, teen language is used both as a symbolic assertion of autonomy and as an index of affiliation to relevant peer groups they appreciate.
This generational gap between teenagers and adults has probably always existed; nevertheless, we could add that it has certainly increased in the last decades, due to the unprecedented changes in communication and media, which have also created new types of communication, such as instant messaging, emails and blogs, added to the development of a popular youth culture, which only started existing in the last decades of the 20th century. Moreover, teenage years are popular for being the most turbulent phase in human life, and this affects young people physically, psychologically, socially and intellectually, making them live in a constant state of flux, which
15
undoubtedly has an important influence on their way of talking (Tagliamonte, 2016: 1-3).
The social interaction between the young is characterised by an informal code, a conversational style which makes use of a particular jargon, often challenging the rules of standard language, in order to affirm this generational difference from the adults’ more formal and standard way of speaking. This diversity affects many different aspects of the English language, such as the more pervasive use of pragmatic markers for bonding effects, the stress of hyperbolic language and intensifiers and, on the opposite, the use of many hedges, depicting, on the one hand, their vision of a black and white world and, on the other, their insecurities; furthermore, certain processes of word-formation and formal modification, such as clipping or syllable reordering, the consistent use of teasing and taboo words, also used as a bonding strategy and, last but not least, the choice of an innovative vocabulary. Their choice of words as a bricolage of creative language is, undoubtedly, the most ear-catching means both for group-unification and outsider exclusion (Stenström, Jørgensen, 2019: 88). Their vocabulary is, above all, filled with an important contribution of neologisms; even though nonce-formations, loanwords and new lexemes have always been part of languages, we could state that neologisms nowadays are very pervasive, especially in teen talk, due to the influences from our extremely interconnected world and the rise of new technological realities.
16 2. NEOLOGISMS
In her “English Word-Formation”, Laurie Bauer cites Hudson to underline an important quality of language:
“Irregularity is an important manifestation of a regularity of language: change.” (Bauer, 1983: 42)
In other words, language has always evolved over time and it always will; this evolution concerns all its aspects, from its sound system (phonology), to the word and sentence construction level (morphology and syntax), including real and implied meanings it provides (semantics and pragmatics). Among the various levels of language change, the lexical one is probably the most frequent type and, certainly, the easiest one to observe. This is because the vocabulary of a linguistic community needs to follow society’s development and, with the evolution and advancement of lifestyle, culture and technology, glossaries of new words for expressing ourselves are always required. In other words, the lexicon needs to chronicle the passing of time and reflect people’s lives and interests, accounting for the way people talk about themselves and the world around them. To a certain extent, the vocabulary of a certain linguistic community could be compared to growth tree rings: in the same way, these account for the tree’s history, present and, eventually, future, such as the community’s history and developments are accounted for through vocabulary. In particular, during the last fifty years vocabulary has evolved considerably, following our frenetic lives and world, where nothing is ever the same as the year before, where there seems to be no time to fix certain concepts in our minds that our world has already moved on, presenting us with some new ones to absorb.
The rise in the amount of neologisms experienced during the last decades can be explained mainly for two reasons: firstly, the massive contribution of new technologies that have sprung up from the development of the 2.0 web influence people’s lives and realities and,
17
inevitably, the way we think and communicate; this event has, indeed, also taken to an essential need to certify for new realities concerning technological devices and social media; secondly, globalisation, a phenomenon that not only affects our world-wide economic and social reality, but also has a huge influence on language, as the constant contacts between different linguistic communities affect the way people talk, giving rise to many linguistic loans that are then constantly accounted for as neologisms in official dictionaries for that specific linguistic community.
With no doubt, another important contribution for neologism creation is slang, which appears to be an essential contribution for teen-identity construction, in that it is mainly used to differ from adults’ way of speaking and to establish strong in-group bonds.
2.1 A definition
The term neologism was attested as a word of the English vocabulary in 1772, borrowed from the French word néologisme, firstly accounted for in 1734. In particular, neologism consists of the blending of two distinct words: the French word neo meaning ‘new’ and the Greek word logos meaning ‘word’. In lexicography, words and lexicalised word combinations are considered neologisms if they have not yet been included in general dictionaries of standard English (Algeo, 1991:2). In general, it is quite difficult to document when a lexeme actually appears in a certain linguistic community for the first time, as people generally just find themselves using some terms which they didn’t use before, starting to feel their degree of newness despite their long underground existence before being actually reported.
A neologism is a word which has lost its status of nonce formation, which is a word created on the spur of the moment; nevertheless,
18
neologisms are still perceived as new by the majority of the members of a speech community.
Neologism category is quite vast: in particular, it includes single lexemes as the blend word guesstimate, coined around 1935 by combining the words guess and estimate, to indicate an estimation made without substantial basis of facts or statistics, compounds such as
sandwich generation, coined in 1981 to account for a group of
middle-aged adults who care for both their ageing parents and their own children, and idiomatic expressions such as out of the loop, coined around the Sixties to indicate someone who is uninformed or ignorant about a specific situation, considering the loop as the ‘communication channel’. As far as definitions are concerned, it could be useful to also consider definitions of the word taken from selected established dictionaries, in order to subsequently identity the common aspects among all:
• The Oxford English Reference Dictionary defines Neologism as “a new word or expression or the coining or use of new words”. • The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary adds the shift in
meaning concept, defining them as “a new word or expression, or a new meaning for an existing word”.
• The Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary follows the same path as the above, defining neologisms as “new words or expressions in a language, or a familiar word or expression that is now being used with a new meaning”.
• The Encarta World English Dictionary describes them as “a new word or meaning; a recently coined word or phrase; or a recently extended meaning of an existing word or phrase”.
With no doubt, to fall under the neologism definition a word or expression needs to be felt as new, in its form or in its meaning, by a specific linguistic community; however, this definition also presupposes
19
a certain distribution and frequency of the item in question. Therefore, it is not only frequency that is important, but also a permanent frequency over a certain period of time and, above all, the distribution in various communicative contexts and domains.
2.2 The life circle of neologisms
New lexemes are created every day and in various ways. Generally speaking, Bauer (2001: 64) makes a distinction between productivity, an uncontrolled and unmotivated manner which allows speakers to create lexemes that do not have connection with existing words of their language, and a motivated manner, although unpredictable, by which speakers create new lexemes in a controlled way, taking inspiration from already existing words and expressions, which can be defined as
creativity.
After their creation, these words need to undergo many steps before they are accounted for in dictionaries, being considered actual lexemes of a certain linguistic system. Firstly, a word needs to spread among a certain linguistic community; secondly, the word needs to be accepted and feel natural to the speakers and, subsequently, it could undergo a lexicalisation process to be included in a dictionary.
It goes without saying that many lexical creations will not survive the spur-of-the-moment: in fact, as already mentioned in the previous paragraph, many linguists make a distinction between nonce-words and
neologisms: nonce-words are creations that have their existence limited
to the context in which they are created, they have a typical once-only usage; they are also called hapax legomena, and can be defined as ephemeral, as the majority of these creations die out due to the fact that they do not succeed in spreading among the linguistic community. According to Hohenhaus (Guz, 2012: 223), they are troublesome in the
20
way that they stand between possible words and actual words, responding to the following rules:
• Newness: the creation of these expressions happens anew, from scratch, rather than being recovered from ready-made lexical material already present in the speaker’s mind.
• Context-dependent: these units are dependent from the context they are in, in the sense that they can be understood and used only thanks to some contextual support.
• Deviational: many of these words do not conform to standard morphological-creation rules of that specific language.
• Non-lexicalisable: for all the above-mentioned reasons, they are often not accounted for in dictionaries, not being able to undergo the lexicalisation process.
An example of nonce formation can be found in the below sentence, citing Guz (2012: 227):
The capitalization was done out of shear ad-hoc'ishness (if that is a word). We couldn't find a proper wordlist to start with and had to generate our own.
Although the derivative suffix -ishness is typical for noun creation, the nonce formation hoc'ishness appears to be structurally unusual, as
ad-hoc is a fixed construction pertaining to an alien phonological form, far
from English language. Therefore, it results incongruous and peculiar to read, a creative word which simply follows the speaker’s wittiness.
On the other hand, neologisms are lexemes and expressions which survive the moment and are subsequently accounted for in dictionaries. In other words, nonce formations merely have the potential to be spread and accepted by the societal norm, while neologisms have already gained enough foothold in usage to be part of the vocabulary of a substantial number of language users (Bauer, 1983).
21
Following the life cycle of neologisms proposed by Priyadarshani and Bhagavan (2013: 25-35), the most common steps that these words face can be summarised in:
• Unstable: in this phase, these words appear to be very new or are used by a limited portion of a specific linguistic community or social group; these neologisms can also be defined as
protologisms.
• Diffused: despite not yet having reached a pervasive level of acceptance, these expressions obtain a noteworthy incidence of use.
• Stable: the expression or word gains recognisability and is accepted by the linguistic community, despite being somehow still on a novelty level.
• Dated: a neologism stops being such as, in other terms, it ceases being novel for a certain linguistic community; it has already entered formal acceptance and is accounted for in dictionaries. • Passé: at this stage, the lexical item has become so culturally
dated that speakers avoid its usage. The word is behind the times and can also be out of step with the norms of a changed cultural tradition.
There is no specific reason or explanation to predict whether a neologism will stay or will die as a nonce word. An example, provided by David Crystal (2001: 132) regards the American humourist Gellett Burges: the word blurb he coined in 1907 is now a lexeme present in English dictionaries, probably for the fact that it met a need in that specific situation and quickly spread around the linguistic community, being then accounted for in the Oxford English Dictionary. On the other hand, his term gubble, coined to indicate the action of indulging in meaningless conversations, never caught on.
22
Contrary to Crystal’s belief, Nordquist cites Susie Dent (2003) on possible reasons that make a new word or expression successful, with a good chance of spreading and undergoing a subsequent lexicalisation process:
Very roughly speaking, there are five primary contributors to the survival of a new word: usefulness, user-friendliness, exposure, the durability of the subject it describes, and its potential associations or extensions. If a new word fulfils these robust criteria it stands a very good chance of inclusion in the modern lexicon. (Nordquist, 2020).
In other words, a neologism needs to fulfil a need by representing a concept in a more punctual way or by describing a new concept that has just entered a specific linguistic community. Moreover, this lexeme should be accessible to speakers and easy to pronounce by following the language’s morphological rules and, for this reason, productive: in other words, it should be possible to create new concepts by linking the lexeme together with other words to create idioms, collocations or other related words, by following affixation, compounding and other morphological strategies. Additionally, the more the word is used and is present in everyday conversations, or describing realities that represent speaker’s lives, the more it shall have the possibility to spread and remain as a new word of the modern lexicon.
2.3 Neologisms in time
Languages always change over time, and new words are added to the vocabulary of a linguistic community when a new concept needs to be described; these words can derive from linguistic material that is already present in the language, or can be created from scratch, as when an author chooses a new word to describe a reality that was not yet represented; in
23
other occasions, words are added to vocabulary due to contacts with other linguistic communities.
2.3.1 The English language as a borrower
In his work English as a Global Language, David Crystal (2003: 6) underlines the cosmopolitan nature of the English language. In fact, many neologisms were borrowed over the years thanks to the constant contacts with other linguistic realities, being then accounted for as official lexemes of the English language.
Katamba (2005: 143) states that the number of words borrowed into English increases each century; therefore, the English lexicon can now be compared to a large mosaic of words deriving from different corners of the world.
According to Crystal (2003: 126) the first borrowings incorporated into Old English can be dated as far back as to the Celtic times. In particular, Celtic expressions usually regarded everyday activities and objects: we can list ordinary words such as bin, cradle,
comb, place names and rivers such as London, Carlisle, Devon, Dover, Cornwall, Thames.
Another language which significantly contributed to the lexicon of Old English was Latin. Stockwell and Minkova (2001: 32) state that the first words deriving from Latin entered Old English around the 5th century. This is due to the contact between the Roman Empire and the pre-Old English Germanic tribes. In fact, many of these words regard military and political administration. Some examples are master, city,
paper, circle, caesarean. Indeed, one the most notable influence of Latin
upon Old English arrived with the acceptance of Christianity by the Anglo-Saxon tribes. Crystal (2003: 126) adds that, since those times, the
24
English lexicon has included words like bishop, church, priest, school,
apostolic, martyr.
Crystal (2003: 126) also underlines how the Norman Conquest enormously affected the Middle English lexicon and provided its speakers with thousands of French words. In connection with this, Katamba (2005: 141-143) states that French was the greatest provider of borrowings to English for centuries because of its dominant status in the fields of government, politics, military field and diplomacy. Some examples come from the government sphere: chancellor, jail, judge, jury; the words chaplain, clergy, priest were drawn from the religious field and
battle, navy, marine, army from the military one.
According to Katamba (2005: 141), another important contribution to English vocabulary comes from the Arabic world, often thanks to the contacts between the English and French community, for what concerns, on top of all, scientific terms and education. Among these, we find every-day vocabulary like sugar, magazine, cotton and words with the recognisable Arabic article al- such as in algebra, alcohol,
alchemy.
Following Stockwell and Minkova (2001: 33), one of the major influences on the early vocabulary came with the North Germanic tribes. The closeness between the Scandinavian community and the Old English language, facilitated the process of assimilation of Scandinavian terms; in particular, Crystal (2003: 126) notes that about two-thousand Scandinavian words were incorporated into Old English with the Viking invasion; some examples are skin, sky, dirt, anger, blight, by-law, cake,
call, clumsy, doze, egg, fellow, gear, get, give, hale, hit, husband, kick, kill, kilt, kindle, law.
Stockwell and Minkova (2001: 38) claim that it was in the 14th century when the influence of foreign languages on the English lexicon weakened and English gained its dominant status in the spheres of administration, commerce, art and learning. However, Crystal (2003: 126)
25
notes that foreign words were also adopted in the times of Early Modern English. In fact, the extraordinary surge of interest in classics during the Renaissance period, opened the gates to a new wave of borrowings from Latin and – to a lesser extent – from Greek. Numerous Latin and Greek words were firstly used by the humanist Thomas More in his Latin and English publications: anticipate, contradictory, exact, exaggerate,
explain, fact, monopoly, necessitate, pretext. Many classical borrowings
also appeared in Shakespeare’s works, some examples of which are
accommodation, apostrophe, dislocate, misanthrope, reliance, submerge;
while many Greek borrowings have a more specialised meaning and belong to scientific terminology such as acid, analysis, antenna,
apparatus, appendix, atom, axis, complex, diagnosis.
Around 1650 a major colonial expansion of the English empire began, together with an important industrial and technological revolution, plus a significant wave of American immigration; as a result, words from all over the world began to pour in the lexicon during this period. Furthermore, the tendency for specialists to borrow words from Latin and Greek, including creating new words by resorting to Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes continued, also increasing with the development of science, technology, and other fields.
Some of these terms regard cultural events from French such as ballet,
cabernet, cachet, chaise longue, champagne; others from Spanish and
the Latin American world are armada, adobe, alligator, alpaca,
armadillo, barricade, bravado, cannibal, canyon, coyote, desperado, embargo, enchilada, guitar, tortilla. As far as Italian loanwords are
concerned, many regard culture and food: cameo, duo, piano, opera,
soprano, motto, macaroni, broccoli and, more recently, pasta, linguini, cappuccino, espresso, the latter coming from Italian American
immigrants.
To summarise, English is an extremely contaminated language, a perfect patchwork of many different languages; its vocabulary has added,
26
over time, many words from various linguistic realities, after having undergone a lexicalisation process, that has brought neologisms to become official lexemes of the English language.
2.3.2 Literary contributions
When technological devices were just a faraway future development, many neologisms were introduced and spread thanks to English authors. Although the amount of introduction of new words in English literature has varied over time, two very prolific periods can be mentioned: the first one regards the last decades of Renaissance, a period that gave rise to the expansion of printed text and to the affirmation of English as the ‘language of academy’. In this period of language change and innovation, the most important authors of the time, among whom Shakespeare and Milton, promoted the creation of new terms that spread around the linguistic community thanks to their works. Subsequently, the rebellious spirit of the Victorian generation, striving against society rules, influenced language evolution: many authors of the time represent this revolution in their works, among these Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Nonsense poets Lear and Carroll.
W. L. Renwick, who places Edmund Spenser at the forefront of that revolution in poetic language, writes:
The new idea of the new poets was, that the modern age and the modern tongues were capable of poetry as great in kind as the ancient; it followed that treatment had to be in accord with conception, that the power of expression both of the language and of the poet had to be cultivated (Renwick, 1926: 65).
The most noticeable way in which this new poetic language was advanced was in the creation of new words.
27
One of the most innovative authors of the Renaissance period is William Shakespeare: David Crystal (2003) analyses the author’s innovative language. Shakespeare came up with over two-thousand neologisms, three-hundred of which were created by adding the prefix
un-, used to give birth to antonyms: some examples are unaware, unreal
and uncomfortable, which were then reported in dictionaries a few decades after. We can find many examples in “Macbeth”, where the protagonist describes the vision of Banquo’s ghost as unreal mockery and his state of mind as self-abuse, troubling his condition which is then described as a fitful fever.
When talking about innovative writing, an example from the Victorian period is with no doubt Lewis Carroll: known for his creative and “nonsense writing” (Williams, 2008), he often fills his works and poems with nonce formations and portmanteau words, which can be defined as blends of words in which parts of multiple words are combined to create new words or, as Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice in “Alice in Wonderland”, “when there are two meanings packed up in one word”; an extreme example can be found in the opening lines of “Jabberwocky”:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
Despite the fact that many of these words only had a playful goal and the aim of triggering the reader’s imagination, Carroll also invented lexemes that are nowadays accounted for in English language official vocabularies. The word mimsy was probably coined from the blending of
miserable and flimsy.
Another example can be found in “Through the looking glass”, novel published in 1871, in which the verb to chortle1 is accounted for
28
the first time from the blending of the words to chuckle and to snort, with the meaning of ‘exclaiming with a noisy chuckle’ from the Oxford
English Dictionary.
Another important contribution comes from James Joyce that coins many neologisms especially in his last publications, in which language creativity is vastly experimented.
In Joyce’s “Ulysses” we find “she smile-smirked supercilious”, a perfect term which can be used to describe our smug age, when every facial expression, word, and emoji comes with an implied eye roll, or the term
skeeze, when he describes characters “skeesing round the door” or
“always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels”.
On many occasions, neologisms are introduced by English authors in their works for children and teenage audience; in fact, although it could be thought that this use could create a counterproductive difficultly in reading, children and teenagers seem to enjoy the creativity and playfulness of texts and, on top of all, seem to understand them despite not knowing the exact meaning of the introduced neologisms (Cheetham, 2016: 93).
The English author Roald Dahl creates many neologisms in his works: an example comes from the title of one of his first works, “The
Gremlins” published in 1943. This word was considered a ‘false
neologism’, a word that, despite being real, is very rare or relatively unknown, sounding original and new to the audience: in fact, before Dahl’s use, it only pertained to mythology and had probably never been used in print (Cheetham, 2016: 94). Dahl also used words which already existed shifting their meaning to an original usage: an example is widget, originally meaning some kind of gadget or mechanical part, but used by Dahl to mean a ‘child gremlin’, subsequently sticking in readers’ minds with the latter meaning and being lexicalised in official English language dictionaries. As far as Roald Dahl’s style is concerned, ‘gobblefunk’
29
needs to be mentioned: it concerns playing around with words in an extremely creative way by blending words together or using alliteration to rise readers’ interest. As Susan Rennie, producer of the Roald Dahl’s dictionary, states “sometimes Dahl explains the word, so we know that a
snozzcumber is a striped knobbly vegetable from the description in The
BFG2”, while other times he prefers to leave words deliberately vague, with the aim of triggering childrens’ imagination; an example is the
Humplecrimp, “an animal that is very common in Giant Country, but
which no human bean has ever seen (so you will have to imagine what it looks like!)".
2.4 The creation of neologisms
Generally speaking, the process of creation of neologisms can follow two different paths which Laurie Bauer (2001: 64) defines as the “productivity” process, by which native speakers create a number of principally uncontrollable formations, giving birth to new terms from scratch to describe new concrete or abstract realities, and the “creativity” process, by which speakers add new expressions to their language system in a way that, although being unpredictable, follows a certain degree of motivation as, for example, being formed by using intentional extra-grammatical operations such as derivation, blending processes and
lexeme shortening. In other words, the newness of the expression may be
in the expression itself or in the novel use or form of an already existing lexeme: in the latter case, it may concern what the word refers to or the word’s grammatical structure.
As far as typology is concerned, following Algeo’s classification (1991), six main etymological categories for neologism creation can be
2
30
listed and are discussed below, e.g. creating, borrowing, combining, shortening, blending and shifting.
2.4.1 Creating
Creating is the process of producing an expression from scratch or, in other words, ex nihilo. This process of lexeme creation is quite unusual and unnatural for human beings, as we have not been made to create things from nothing and nearly everything men make is produced from materials they already have.
Therefore, this category is the less productive for neologism creation; in particular, it includes those new expressions that do not depend on already existing lexemes of a specific linguistic community and words that come from onomatopoeic expressions.
An example of an ex-nihilo creation is the word hobbit, coined by J.R.R. Tolkien to account for a small humanoid creature, appearing as a neologism for the first time in “The Hobbit”, 1937. Subsequently, the lexeme was registered in the Oxford English Dictionary, which added the entry for the new word in the Seventies.
The coinage process is typically applied for new commercial brand names that occasionally, in case the brand has large notoriety, after a first phase of novelty of the lexeme undergo a lexicalisation process and are accounted for in dictionaries; Stockwell and Minkova (2001, 5) observe that:
In the world of marketing, such creations generally are the result of massive commercial research efforts to find a combination of sounds that does not suggest something they do not want to suggest, words that have a pleasant ring to them and that are easy to pronounce (Stockwell, Minkova, 2001).
31
Therefore, the chosen brand names on many occasions do not have a specific reason for their creation or, at least, do not depend on already existing lexemes of the English language. These brand names may, with time, become general terms which are well known by a specific linguistic community, in other words, they become of supraordinate use. An example can be the term kleenex, which was born as a brand name and is nowadays used for any cleansing tissue; or pyrex used for any glassware resistant to heat.
As far as onomatopoeic expressions are concerned, they can be defined as lexemes that phonetically imitate, resemble or reproduce sounds present in the environment; some examples can be the impact sounds boom, crash, whack, thump, bang, the voice sounds shush, giggle,
growl, murmur, blurt, hiss and the nature ones splash, drip, spray, whoosh, buzz, rustle. These words do not lack productivity, in fact many lexemes
were created as nouns and have then become verbs over time, following all morphological rules for verbal conjugation.
2.4.2 Borrowing
New lexical items can be also created by borrowing, the process by which words are taken over from other linguistic repertoires, either in their lexical form as foreign words, defined as “loan words” by Katamba, or by morphological translation of the foreign word, defined as “loan shifts” by linguists or, frequently, also “calques” or “loan translations” (Katamba, 2005: 137).
In other words, lexical borrowing may take the form of ‘adoption’ or ‘adaptation’. We talk about adoption when the borrowed word retains its original form, although pronunciation could vary following the target language’s sound system. On the other hand, adaptation refers to the various degrees of ‘nativisation’ of the loan, including morphological
32
modifications. One example of adaptation, directly relevant to the lexical enrichment discussion, is a ‘calque’. In a calque the new meaning is expressed through translation into native lexical material. A commonly quoted example with English as the target language is superman, translated from the German lexeme Übermensch.
This process for lexeme creation is, contrary to the ex-nihilo creation, very productive. Crystal observes that:
The majority of language’s loan words do not replace anything. Rather, they gently elbow their way in, nudging aside already existing words and adding an extra sense or nuance to what was there before (Crystal, 2006: 62).
Numerous words of the English dictionary come from foreign ones and its casual rich variety pertains to the vast number of words it has taken from other languages (Cumshudova, 2018: 30). Many terms have entered English vocabulary thanks to the contacts English had over time with other linguistic communities.
We could start by taking into consideration the dissemination of the Christian culture through Latin in Anglo-Saxon England, which surely added numerous Latin-derived borrowings to the English vocabulary and, subsequently, the interactions between French, Latin, Scandinavian, Celtic, and English during the Middle Ages. Another important reason for the borrowing of foreign expressions is, indeed, the exposure to other languages during the colonial era: in this case, many new lexemes were adopted thanks to the contact between English colonisers and the colonised community; during this period, numerous words were borrowed to describe new exported concepts, as the borrowers would often adopt the word from the native language.
As far as the last decades are concerned, the contact between different linguistic communities in multicultural cities should also be considered for the contribution of borrowings to the English language. Nowadays, these contacts and influences are stronger thanks to our
33
globalised world: in fact, there is no need to have direct contact with a linguistic community to include borrowings in the language, as languages are also spread worldwide through social media, television, films and TV series.
In particular, Svobodová (Shurooq, Dipima, 2019) defines the reasons behind borrowing foreign words into the native language:
• Terminologically, lexemes can be borrowed because there is no equivalent existent in the recipient language of the speaker. • Borrowings may also be adopted by a linguistic community for
academic reasons: in fact, international communication, especially nowadays in our globalised world, often require international terms to ease transmission of important information. • Another reason concerns style: in fact, using foreign terms instead of native ones can be a very common way to add trendiness to speakers’ idiolect.
Borrowings can be of various types, depending on how they are adopted by the target linguistic community; following Algeo’s classification, we can talk of simple loanwords, adopted loanwords and loan translations.
2.4.2.1 Simple loanwords
In some cases, lexemes are adopted with no major variation: they remain the same as the original form of the source language. However, on some occasions, these words and expressions can undergo some minor modification for what concerns, for example, pronunciation; in other
words, they are conformed to the rules of the English sound system. The major source for linguistic loans in English is the French language:
in fact, since 1066, year of the Norman conquest of England, there was a prolonged and massive contact between these two linguistic communities
34
and many terms were introduced with no major modification. Some examples are priest, prayer and parish from the religious semantic field,
army, battalion and corps from the military one.
Another important source for direct loanwords is German: in fact, English came into direct contact with German especially during the Second World War, therefore these lexemes mostly concerned the military world: snorkel, blitzrieg, flak.
As far as Spanish is concerned, simple loans are, on top of all, relative to the domain of politics and music; some examples are mambo,
bachata, fidelismo, fidelista.
Nowadays, due to its international nature, English vocabulary is the one that is mostly borrowed by other linguistic communities: this is due to the fact that English works as a lingua franca for worldwide communications and many technological and scientific terms are coined in English and borrowed by other communities to describe the same reality.
2.4.2.2 Adopted loanwords
In some cases, loanwords are accounted for in the target language vocabulary after the remodelling process of a meaningful part of their form: they suffer a significant morphological change rather than only a pronunciation or spelling adjustment. This happens because, as Baugh and Cable report citing Mulcaster, words need to face a familiarisation process before they sound natural, and often this is facilitated by their remodelling:
[…]And make the thing familiar if it seme to be strange. For all strange things seme great novelties, and hard of entertainment at their first arrivall, till theie be acquainted: but after acquaintance theie be verie familiar, and easie to entreat. Familiaritie and
35
acquaintance will cause facilitie, both in matter and in words (Baugh, Cable, 2005: 206).
In other words, these terms are adapted from their foreign word pattern to a form that feels closer to the native one. An example can be the omission of foreign endings to fit the morphological form of the English vocabulary: examples are the French -ism and the Spanish -ismo suffixes which are replaced by the English suffix -ism as in the adopted loanword
Federalism.
Another example concerns orthography, which is often naturalised to fit with the English writing rules; in particular, this is true when dead languages such as Greek and Latin are considered: their suffixes and prefixes are often adapted to fit English orthographical rules such as for Spelunca, kybernetes, ataraxia.
The borrowing process from foreign languages is a process that not only concerns full words or expressions but also affects suffixes or affixes. In the Renaissance, the interest towards classical languages brought to the adoption of Greek and Latin roots into the English writing rules: English words were formed as compounds or with affixed derivates to sound impressive and recall the classical world. An example is the introduction of the Latin prefix prae- becoming pre-( Baugh, Cable,2005: 198).
2.4.2.3 Loan translations
Instead of borrowing the form of a foreign word, English sometimes borrows its meaning, rendering the foreign sense by appropriate words already present in the language: in other words, a translation from the source language to the target one takes place. These peculiar loanwords are also known as ‘calques’. Occasionally, the loan translations of the target language exist alongside the corresponding simple loanwords they
36
translate. An example from French is new cuisine, co-existing with the French term nouvelle cuisine, or the German Fortress Europa beside
Festung Europa. An example from Russian as a source language is the
loan translation apparatus, existing together with the simple loanword
apparat. As far as Spanish is concerned, a clear example is the expression blond from the coast, which is accounted in English vocabulary such as
the simple loan rubia de la costa.
2.4.3 Combining
Another essential process for creating neologisms consists in combining two or more existing words or morphemes into new forms. The combining method is very productive and it involves two different types of process, for compounds and derivatives. In particular, a ‘compound’ combines two or more free morphemes giving birth to a new lexeme, whereas a ‘derivative’ combines a base with one or more affixes, either prefixes or suffixes.
The combining process is very common to coin lexemes which denote new technological realities and inventions, by adding something new to already existing items: an example is the concept of mobile phone, coined in the ‘80s to describe a new functionality for the normal phones with cables connectors of the ‘70s. Furthermore, these phones not only allowed us to send oral messages, but by the ‘90s we could also send written texts: the compound word text message was coined to fulfil that need.
The process of compounding is often very creative and the resulting expressions often stick in language, spread among the linguistic community and gradually push their way into official dictionaries: a coherent example can be provided by an expression coined in the ‘90s to refer to films which, despite not being exciting, are educational and
37
informative, e.g. spinach cinema. This metaphoric compound neologism, based on the concept that the film is not very tasty but good for you - as spinach is usually thought of being-, also contaminated other realities: in fact, we nowadays also have concepts as spinach television and spinach
books3.
2.4.4 Shortening
A new word can be made by omitting part of an already existing word; different morphological processes can bring to the creation of neologisms. The simplest form of shortening is clipping, which Bauer defines as:
The process whereby a lexeme (simplex or complex) is shortened, while retaining the same meaning and still being a member of the same form class. Frequently clipping results in a change of stylistic level. (Bauer, 1983, 233).
This process brings to the creation of shorter words maintaining the same meaning as the full word; some examples are main, coming from main
course, disco, with the same meaning of discotheque, rehab as rehabilitation and pic as picture.
Although the clipped form appears to have the same meaning of its full correspondent, some linguists affirm the different semantic role of the clipped forms, as having two words with exactly the same meaning would go against the economy principle of language.
Plag offers a possible explanation as to the meaning associated with clipping:
Additionally, the question may arise of what meaning is associated with truncations. What exactly is the semantic difference between Ronald and Ron, laboratory and lab?
38
Although maybe not particularly obvious, it seems that the truncations, in addition to the meaning of the base, signal the familiarity of the speaker with the entity s/he is referring to. The meaning of familiarity can be seen as the expression of a type of social meaning through which speakers signal their belonging to a certain group. (Plag, 2003: 22-23)
Therefore, the semantic meaning between the two forms varies, as the clipped form adds informality and familiarity to the conversation.
Another characteristic feature of clipping is that the clipped word can subsequently acquire autonomy, being combined with other word-formation processes, de facto adopting all the properties of the full form. The following two examples have been taken from the American ‘sitcom’ “How I Met Your Mother”:
These swords represent our brohood (S.1, Ep.8)
- We’re bros […] we’re going to have one last awesome night as bros. It’s a broing away party. A special broccasion. A bro-choice rally. A brotime of the Apollo. - No, don’t bro me!
In the above dialogue, the clipped form bro becomes very productive, giving birth to several creative forms which prototypically follow morphological rules of the English language. In particular, bro is an example of ‘clipping’, probably the most productive type of neologism creation, which is defined as the process of shortening a word by omitting what is, or is thought to be, an affix or other constituent morpheme. An example can be the trademark Zipper that has given birth to the verb zip, formed by omitting the -er ending as though it were the agent suffix of the verb. Most back formations omit suffixes with a process of ‘de-suffixation’. A productive example is the omission of the suffix -ed, which gives birth to clipped forms such as chicken-fry, gift-wrap,
custom-make or the omission of infinite suffix -ing, which gives birth to air condition, brainstorm.
39
Another productive form of shortening is ‘acronym’, a lexeme which is made of the initial letters of the words of an expression. An example is scuba, which comes from self-contained breathing apparatus. Many acronyms also contaminate the creation of other terms having more or less the same meaning: an example is the acronym MILF
(Mother I’d Like to Fuck) which has subsequently brought to the
formation of DILF (Dad I’d Like to Fuck) and, in the last years, also
NILF (Nanny I’d Like to Fuck).Acronyms are very popular nowadays,
and this is demonstrated by the increasing number and size of dictionaries. Fourteen dictionaries of general initialisms have appeared since the Second World War, among which the Acronyms Dictionary of
the Sixties, Paxton’s released in 1974, Webster’s dated 1985 and Miller
1988.
2.4.5 Blending
The morphological process of simultaneously combining and shortening is called blending. In fact, a word-blend or portmanteau is formed by combining parts of two separate words with different meanings to form a new concept.
As Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice in Carroll’s Through the Looking
Glass:
"You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word."
Blends are usually created following two different paths:
1) By adding the first part of the first word to the second part of the second word, as for the word smog, combining smoke and fog. 2) By combining the first part of the two words, as for cyborg, combination of cybernetic and organism.
40
New blends are being created all the time as cultural and technological trends emerge. Nowadays, this process for neologism formation is becoming more and more productive, especially to describe new emerging technological realities. An example is e-mail, a blend expression coined in 1982 as the short form for electronic mail, which was coined to describe the new electronic reality thanks to which messages are sent and arrive promptly via electronic device, compared to the old mail system, subsequently defined snail mail (1983).
Another example is the popular word blog, short for weblog, which was coined in 1998 as a combination of two already existing words and concepts being web and log4, to describe online journals emerged
few years before.
The word emoticon we are all familiar with nowadays was coined in 1994, from the combination of emotion and icon to represent the new mobile-phone reality though which emotions are conveyed to a text message, by using digital icons or simply by adding explicative punctuation.
Some blended words are rather creative, as the concept of
workaholic coined in 1968 to describe a new frenetic reality of our
globalised world, people that see their work as an addiction, dedicating all their time to it. The suffix -aholic, abstracted from alcoholic, also gave rise to other similar concepts describing habits concerning our society, such as shopaholic, coined in 1984 or chocoholic, accounted for in 1971.
2.4.6 Shift in meaning
Time can change the conventional semantic meaning of a lexeme: this often happens when speakers start using words in different contexts and,
