Analogy in Word-formation. A Study of English Neologisms and Occasionalisms

Nowadays many new English words owe their origin and raison d’être to the analogical process, which transversely applies to a spectrum of neoformations ranging from grammatical and regular neologisms to extra-grammatical and even ungrammatical nonce words. This book explores both surface analogy and analogy via schema in four different fields where neology works at its best, namely, specialised, juvenile, journalistic, and literary language. The predominance of intended neologisms with no overt model in the former area counterbalances the massive incidence of occasionalisms with explicit reference to the model in the latter area. A corpus-based study corroborates these findings. Moreover, offline testing of the acceptability of analogies by native English speakers validates the claims that new target words are preferentially formed after concrete models that also conform to rule patterns, and they are principally accepted when the models are well-known and easily recoverable. The book gathers more than 870 examples of analogical words, most of which are recent or present-day neologisms enriching the English lexicon. This makes this book of interest to a number of scholars who deal with English lexicography, lexicology, neology, lexicogenesis, paradigmatic morphology, word creation, and word-formation in general.