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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. 122–141

Metalinguistic comments and signals

What can they tell us about the conventionalization of neologies?

| Stockholm University

Many neologies receive a large amount of metalinguistic focus during their conventionalization. This includes explicit metalinguistic comments, as well as several ways of emphasizing a new word qua word in running texts, so-called metasignals (e.g., quotation marks). This article reports from a large quantitative study of 360 Swedish neologies. It investigates the nature and the amount of metafocus during conventionalization. More than 96% of the neologies received metafocus at least once, but the mean proportion of metafocused citations was low, just under 3.5%. Metafocusing is likely to be more intense in early phases and is likely to decline over time. No long-term effects of metafocusing on the conventionalization process itself were found in corpus data.

Keywords: conventionalization, neologies, metalinguistic comments, metasignals, metafocus, corpus data
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metacomments and metasignals
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Patterns of metafocusing
  • 5.Decline over time
  • 6.How does metafocusing affect conventionalization?
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.18005.sva
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