Metalinguistic comments and signals
What can they tell us about the conventionalization of
neologies?
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.
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
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Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Becker, Israela
2024.
Let my speakers talk: metalinguistic activity can indicate semantic change.
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 20:2
► pp. 289 ff.

Winter-Froemel, Esme
2023.
Alterity marking and enhancing accessibility in lexical borrowing: meta-information techniques in the use of incipient anglicisms in French and Italian.
Folia Linguistica 57:2
► pp. 345 ff.

Winter-Froemel, Esme
2023.
Alterity marking and enhancing accessibility in lexical borrowing: meta-information techniques in the use of incipient anglicisms in French and Italian.
Folia Linguistica 0:0

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