ADAM MICKIEWICZ UNIVERSITY IN POZNAŃ
Faculty of English
Extracting neologisms from
a corpus using NeoDet
Marta Grochocka
martag@wa.amu.edu.pl
wa.amu.edu.pl
The development of a lexical item
(Bauer 1983)
1. Nonce formation
Neologism (Fischer 1998)


certain frequency over a certain period of time
distribution in different contexts and domains
2. Institutionalization
3. Lexicalization
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Types of neologisms
• formal  a new word, including acronyms and
affixes, e.g. PC, e-, -gate (Metcalf 2002)
• syntactic  a new expression or grammatical
construction
• semantic  a new meaning of an already
existing word
• borrowing
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Methodology
Aims of the study:
to examine productive morphological processes in
English by means of studying formal neologisms
PART 1: Formal classification
PART 2: Semantic classification
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Neologism detector tool
Functions:
1. compilation of the study corpus
2. neologism extraction based on the exclusion principle
3. neologism management
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Neologism extraction process
Study corpus
Exclusion sources
Neologism candidates
Manual verification
Neologism management
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Study corpus size and content

14.3 million words
newspaper articles and blogs published between
1st Jan. 2009 and 26th Oct. 2010

daily broadsheets: The Daily Telegraph, The Times,
The Guardian

tabloids: The Sun, The Daily Mail



almost 9,000 neologism candidates analyzed
(out of ca. 73,000)
121 neologisms extracted (without borrowings)
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Exclusion sources
Corpus: The British National Corpus (1991-1994)
General dictionaries:

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th Edition, OALD7 (2005)

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 11th Edition, MW11 (2006)

Macmillan English Dictionary 2nd Edition, MEDAL2 (2007)

Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary 3rd Edition, CALD3 (2008)

Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, CH11 (2008)

Google: COBUILD

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 5th Edition, LDOCE5 (2009)

Dictionary.com
Slang dictionaries:

The Oxford Dictionary of New Words (1991)

The Probert Encyclopaedia of Slang (2004)


The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
(2007)
The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (2007)
Word lists: proper names, geographical names
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Neologism candidates analysis
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Search engine
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Neologism management 1
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Neologism management 2
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Neologism management 3
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Formal classification of neologisms
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Blends
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Twitterati (Twitter + glitterati)
welectricity (wellingtons + electricity)
retrotastic (retro + fantastic)
girlicious (girl + delicious)
Frankenfish (Frankenstein + fish)
Obamarita (Obama + margarita)
Holohoax (Holocaust + hoax)
zeroflation (zero + inflation)
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Semantic classification of neologisms
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Semantic classification – examples
IT and communications technology
Politics and current affairs

beatblogger

Af-Pak

cyber-locker

Muslimist

datablog

Obamanomics

Facebooker

gamification

iPad

celebdom

to liveblog

fabby

to retweet

lip-syncher

pet-set

retrotastic
Business and finance

infocapitalism

micro-employment

zeroflation
Entertainment
Food and dieting

frankenfish

orthorexic
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Problems
• impossible to detect semantic and syntactic neologisms
• alternative spelling, e.g. micro-blog, G & T
• items provided as examples in the exclusion sources not
analyzed by NeoDet
• failure of the online exclusion sources to respond to the
queries made by NeoDet
• overrepresentation of the Entertainment and News
section in the study corpus
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Conclusions
• formal neologisms as indicators of productive word
formation processes
• confirmation of the status of affixation and compounding
as the most popular methods of extending the lexicon
• blends as an important source of neologisms coined with
the purpose of being witty, amusing and memorable
• the largest number of neologisms in the area of IT and
communications technology
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Thank you !
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