Cover not available
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

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

| University of Helsinki
| University of Helsinki
| University of Helsinki

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.

Keywords: neologisms, historical sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, methods, open source, English language, correspondence, spelling variation, normalization, tools
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
Published online: 12 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.18001.sai
References
Adamson, Sylvia
1989 With double tongue: Diglossia, stylistics and the teaching of English. In Mick Short (ed.), Reading, analysing and teaching literature, 204–240. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Alexander, Marc & Christian Kay
2014 The spread of RED in the Historical Thesaurus of English. In Wendy Anderson, Carole P. Biggam, Carole Hough & Christian Kay (eds.), Colour studies: A broad spectrum, 126–139. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Amoia, Marilisa & Jose Manuel Martinez
2013 Using comparable collections of historical texts for building a diachronic dictionary for spelling normalization. In Piroska Lendvai & Kalliopi Zervanou (eds.), Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH 2013), 84–89. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Baron, Alistair, Paul Rayson & Dawn Archer
2009 Automatic standardization of spelling for historical text mining. In Claire Warwick (ed.), Digital Humanities 2009: Conference abstracts, 309–312. College Park, MD: Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie
2001 Morphological productivity (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 95). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bird, Steven, Ewan Klein & Edward Loper
2009 Natural language processing with Python: Analyzing text with the Natural Language Toolkit. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.Google Scholar
Brewer, Charlotte
2007 Treasure-house of the language: The living OED. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Burns, Philip R.
2013 MorphAdorner v2: A Java library for the morphological adornment of English language texts. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. [URL] (19 May 2018)
CEEC. Corpora of Early English Correspondence
. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg et al. at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. [URL] (19 May 2018)
Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo
2012 The role of social networks and mobility in diachronic sociolinguistics. In Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The handbook of historical sociolinguistics (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics), 332–352. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grieve, Jack, Andrea Nini & Diansheng Guo
2017 Analyzing lexical emergence in Modern American English online. English Language and Linguistics 21(1). 99–127. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Sebastian
2004 Using the OED quotations database as a corpus – a linguistic appraisal. ICAME Journal 281. 17–30.Google Scholar
Kaislaniemi, Samuli
2018 The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE). In Terttu Nevalainen, Minna Palander-Collin & Tanja Säily (eds.), Patterns of change in 18th-century English: A sociolinguistic approach (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 8), 45–59. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Kaunisto, Mark
2013 Scare quotes and glosses: Indicators of lexical innovation with affixed derivatives. In Roderick W. McConchie, Teo Juvonen, Mark Kaunisto, Minna Nevala & Jukka Tyrkkö (eds.), Selected proceedings of the 2012 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX 3), 97–106. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels & Irené Wotherspoon
(eds.) 2009 Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online. Oxford University Press. [URL] (19 May 2018)
Miller, George A.
1995 WordNet: A lexical database for English. Communications of the ACM 38(11). 39–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu
1999 Early Modern English lexis and semantics. In Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, III: 1476–1776, 332–458. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
OED. Oxford English Dictionary
. OED Online. Oxford University Press. [URL] (19 May 2018)
Palander-Collin, Minna & Mikko Hakala
2011 Standardized versions of the Corpora of Early English Correspondence. Corpus Resource Database (CoRD). Helsinki: VARIENG. [URL] (19 May 2018)
PCEEC
2006 Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, tagged version. Annotated by Arja Nurmi, Ann Taylor, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Terttu Nevalainen. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team. York: University of York and Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Distributed through the Oxford Text Archive. [URL] (19 May 2018.)
Philips, Lawrence
2000 The double metaphone search algorithm. C/C++ Users Journal 18(6). 38–43.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo
2003 Word-formation in English (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Renouf, Antoinette
2007 Tracing lexical productivity and creativity in the British media: ‘The chavs and the chav-nots’. In Judith Munat (ed.), Lexical creativity, texts and contexts (Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 58), 61–89. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Säily, Tanja
2014 Sociolinguistic variation in English derivational productivity: Studies and methods in diachronic corpus linguistics (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki XCIV). Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Säily, Tanja & Jukka Suomela
2017  types 2: Exploring word-frequency differences in corpora. In Turo Hiltunen, Joe McVeigh & Tanja Säily (eds.), Big and rich data in English corpus linguistics: Methods and explorations (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 19). Helsinki: VARIENG. [URL] (19 May 2018)
Säily, Tanja, Jukka Suomela & Eetu Mäkelä
In preparation. Variation in morphological productivity in the history of English: The case of -er .
Scherrer, Yves & Tomaž Erjavec
2016 Modernising historical Slovene words. Natural Language Engineering 22(6). 881–905. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Kerremans, Daphné, Jelena Prokić, Quirin Würschinger & Hans-Jörg Schmid
2018. Using data-mining to identify and study patterns in lexical innovation on the web. Pragmatics & Cognition 25:1 ► pp. 174 ff. DOI logo
Landert, Daniela, Tanja Säily & Mika Hämäläinen
2023. TV series as disseminators of emerging vocabulary: Non-codified expressions in the TV Corpus. ICAME Journal 47:1 ► pp. 63 ff. DOI logo
Nevalainen, Terttu
2018. From speaker innovation to lexical change. Pragmatics & Cognition 25:1 ► pp. 8 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 august 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.