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Category: Project

Description: The neological intuition is an impression that a given word in a given language is new. This phenomenon depends closely on the words' representation in the mental lexicon. It is thereby determined as well by extralinguistical factors – like age, social category or place of residence – as by linguistical factors – like the nature of the word formation process, the language register or the nature of the sentence that contains the neologism. We showed in a previous study that the regularity of the word creation process and the novelty of the word's form have an influence on the neological intuition. We also observed that the results yielded by regular novel words were heterogeneous compared to those yielded by irregular novel words. This study further investigate the latter observation with two experiments on the neological intuition about morphological neologisms. We hypothesize that the degree of productivity of an affix (Baayen, 1989; 1992; 1994), i.e., the likelihood of an affix to generate new words or the profitability (Bauer, 2001), has a strong influence on French native speakers' neological intuition. We assume that the more productive an affix is, the stronger the neological intuition induced by a neologism coined with this affix. The first experiment investigates speakers' metalinguistical judgements and the second investigates speakers' cognitive mechanisms of novel words' recognition.