Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts
Editor
| University of Pisa
The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles, but also examine ‘critical creativity’ determined by language policy, as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words.
The data, based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples, is drawn from advertising, the daily press, electronic communication, literature, spoken interaction, cartoons, lexical ontologies and style guides.
The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles, but also examine ‘critical creativity’ determined by language policy, as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words. The data, based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples, is drawn from advertising, the daily press, electronic communication, literature, spoken interaction, cartoons, lexical ontologies and style guides. Each study analyses novel formations in relation to their contexts of use and inevitably leads to the crucial question of creativity vs. productivity. By focussing on creative lexical formations at the level of parole, these studies provide insights into morphological theory at the level of langue, and ultimately seek to explain lexical creativity as a function of language use.
The data, based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples, is drawn from advertising, the daily press, electronic communication, literature, spoken interaction, cartoons, lexical ontologies and style guides.
The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles, but also examine ‘critical creativity’ determined by language policy, as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words. The data, based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples, is drawn from advertising, the daily press, electronic communication, literature, spoken interaction, cartoons, lexical ontologies and style guides. Each study analyses novel formations in relation to their contexts of use and inevitably leads to the crucial question of creativity vs. productivity. By focussing on creative lexical formations at the level of parole, these studies provide insights into morphological theory at the level of langue, and ultimately seek to explain lexical creativity as a function of language use.
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 58] 2007. xvi, 294 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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List of tables | pp. vii–viii
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List of figures | p. ix
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List of contributors | pp. xi–xii
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Editor's Preface | pp. xiii–xvi
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Introduction
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Lexical creativity, textuality and problems of metalanguageLeonhard Lipka | pp. 3–12
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Lexical Creativity in Disourse
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How to do (even more) things with nonce words (other than naming)Peter Hohenhaus | pp. 15–38
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The phonetics of 'un'Jen Hay | pp. 39–57
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Lexical creativity in texts
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The press
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Tracing lexical productivity and creativity in the British media: The Chavs and the Chav-NotsAntoinette Renouf | pp. 61–89
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Cartoon art
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Cathy Wilcox meets the phrasal lexicon: Creative deformation of phrasal lexical items for humorous effectKoenraad Kuiper | pp. 93–112
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Advertising and the media
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BlendaliciousAdrienne Lehrer | pp. 115–133
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Electronic communication
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Keeping up with the times: Lexical creativity in electronic communicationPaula López Rúa | pp. 137–159
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Fictional genres
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Lexical creativity as a marker of style in science fiction and children's literatureJudith Munat | pp. 163–185
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Creative concept formation
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Dynamic creation of analogically-motivated terms and categories in lexical ontologiesTony Veale | pp. 189–212
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Creative lexical categorization in a narrative fictionMaria Dolores Porto | pp. 213–236
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Sociopolitical effects on creativity
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Occasional and systematic shifts in word-formation and idiom use in Latvian as a result of translationAndrejs Veisbergs | pp. 239–261
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Critical creativity: A study of 'politically correct' terms in style guides for different types of discourseRoswitha Fischer | pp. 263–282
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Name index | pp. 283–285
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Subject index | pp. 287–294
“In terms of overall interest and opening up new vistas for the study of morphology, this book gets a full five stars. [...] Groundbreaking works like this one should be encouraged and attentively read, and their spirit emulated.”
Karen S. Chung, National Taiwan University, in Linguist List 19.3675 (2008)
“Judith Munat has brought together a timely series of interesting studies on lexical creativity. The book offers a wealth of data on the lexical options available to speakers of English to amuse their readers, to attract their attention, and to create fictional or shared private worlds. A wide range of registers, ranging from children's books to science fiction and from speech corpora of interviews to large longitudinal corpora of British newspapers, all bear witness to the importance of lexical creativity for making texts both attractive and effective.”
Harald Baayen, Radboud University Nijmegen & Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
“[The volume] presents the reader with a thought-provoking collection of generally original articles on contemporary issues in lexicology. One might find the diversity of themes and the absence of a common theoretical approach initially unsettling. It is however an inevitable consequence of a collection resulting from an international workshop of this type and might also be considered a strength, as a wealth of methodological perspectives which might otherwise have evolved in isolation are brought together in one place and in one rewarding volume.”
Graham Ranger, Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse, in Lexis: E-journal in English Lexicology
“[...] due to its impressive scope of coverage and the truly creative treatment of lexical creativity, this fine collection will appeal to specialists in several linguistic disciplines and beyond. It is highly informative and thought-provoking.”
Bogdan Szymanek, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, in SKASE Vol. 5 (2008)
“A fascinating introduction to an aspect of word-formation studies that has generally been ignored, the way in which new words are used in texts and why they are coined rather than just how they are coined. This book contains a wealth of valuable data.”
Laurie Bauer, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Cited by
Cited by 8 other publications
Altmann, Eduardo G., Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Adilson E. Motter & Enrico Scalas
2011. Niche as a Determinant of Word Fate in Online Groups.
PLoS ONE 6:5 ► pp. e19009 ff. 
Carter, Ronald
2012. Coda: Some rubber bullet points.
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 21:1 ► pp. 106 ff.
Dal, Georgette & Fiammetta Namer
2016.
In The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology,
► pp. 70 ff.
Ferrara, Casey & Donna Jo Napoli
2019. Manual Movement in Sign Languages: One Hand Versus Two in Communicating Shapes.
Cognitive Science 43:9
Koteyko, Nelya, Mike Thelwall & Brigitte Nerlich
2010. From Carbon Markets to Carbon Morality: Creative Compounds as Framing Devices in Online Discourses on Climate Change Mitigation.
Science Communication 32:1 ► pp. 25 ff.
Körtvélyessy, Lívia, Pavol Štekauer & Pavol Kačmár
2021. On the role of creativity in the formation of new complex words.
Linguistics 59:4 ► pp. 1017 ff.
Nikolić, Marina, Svetlana Slijepčević-Bjelivuk & Slobodan Novokmet
2021. New words in Serbian public discourse as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zbornik radova Filozofskog fakulteta u Pristini 51:1 ► pp. 365 ff.
Stein, Simon David & Ingo Plag
2022. How relative frequency and prosodic structure affect the acoustic duration of English derivatives.
Laboratory Phonology 13:1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 july 2022. 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.
Subjects & Metadata
Linguistics
Terminology & Lexicography
BIC Subject: CF – Linguistics
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General