The area of sound symbolism and onomatopoeia is an interesting area for studying the production and interpretation of neologisms in language. One question is whether neologisms are created haphazardly or governed by rules. Another question is how this can be studied. Of the approximately 60 000 words in the Swedish lexicon 1 500 have been judged to be sound symbolic (Abelin 1999). These were an...

Are today’s neologisms indicating that we are all a bunch of pessimists? New words are produced at the rapid rate of about 15 per day and distributed online. Some words last only a week contained to a small circle of friends while others find a permanent residence in the dictionary. But, as with the words that came before them, they are subject to the force of language evolution. We track a set...

Our project studies social aspects of innovative vocabulary use in early English letters. In this abstract we describe the current state of our method for detecting neologisms. The problem we are facing at the moment is the fact that our corpus consists of non-normalized text. Therefore, spelling normalization is the first step we need to solve before we can apply automatic methods to the whole...

Linguistic creativity is a manifestation of innovativeness. Investigating the diffusion of linguistic innovation requires an interdisciplinary approach, pooling competences from sciences humanistic, social, and strict (in particular mathematics and computational methods). The initial results will be presented of an empirical project analysing the social spread of neologisms in a microblogging s...

We present Onoma, an online tool to conjugate and analyze Spanish verbs and verb neologisms. Its development results from of an important linguistic study in which the Spanish verbal system is approached with an innovative methodology. Both the evaluation and the noticeable success confirm its validity and interest.

This article examines a recent bizarre phenomenon on China’s Internet – the enormous popularity of a scatological Chinese neologism called diaosi, which literally translates as ‘dick string’. Seeing the diaosi phenomenon as a case of ‘infrapolitics’, a space of nuanced discursive practices mediating overt online politics and benign online entertainment, we analyse the ways in which an infrapoli...

Stylometry is usually concerned with finding an authorial invariant, and attempts at authorship identification often model authors based on topics, putting weight on consciously selected content words and their unconsciously controlled frequency. This paper presents two uses of stylometry that rely on factors beyond the control of the author: document dating to a given historical period by dete...

In Japanese and other languages that do not use spaces or other markers between words, the identification and extraction of neologisms and other unrecorded words presents some particular challenges. In this paper we discuss the problems encountered with neologism identification and describe and discuss some of the methods that have been employed to overcome these problems.

Over the past few years, we have read several publications regarding the term "cat scratch colon." This neologism was developed to define some bright red linear markings seen in the colonic mucosa that resemble scratches made by a cat. We would like to communicate a recent case attended at our institution.

Access to textbooks in one’s own language, in parallel with the original version in the instructional language, is known to be quite helpful for foreign students studying abroad. Cooperative post-editing (PE) of specialized textbook pretranslations by the foreign students themselves is a good way to produce the ”target” versions, if the students find it rewarding, and not too time-consuming, th...