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Category: Project

Description: The pandemic the world has been through during the last 18 months has caused the appearance of a large amount of novel realities for whom there was a significant lack of established, functional denominations in most languages. The phenomenon has been sudden, unexpected and global (Zizek, 2020; Agamben 2020; Innerarity, 2020), resulting in an unprecedented linguistic situation and triggering the denominative possibilities of many languages. Speakers in contact with the COVID-19 (either direct or incidental), no matter their mother tongue, have been forced to adjust, recombine and reinterpret their linguistic abilities and resources in order to categorize and label consistently and efficiently all those new realities. This has generated a true outburst of neological units in languages such as Spanish, and the aim of this study is to leverage such a unique situation to delve into the study of the correlations existing between neologisms’ processing and coining processes. If the production and recognition of new words by speakers follow some kind of patterns, how could we measure to what extent are both interrelated? In our study, we look at neologism from the point of view of formal structure (comprising processes such as syntagmation, acronymy, pre and suffixation, composition, etc.) and semantic motivation (metaphor and metonymy), thus bridging the gap between the cognitive and discursive forces driving the generation of new words. We designed a two-folded survey conducted with a sample of 148 speakers: first, we provided them with a set of images depicting objects somehow related to the pandemics and asked them to name them. We then gave them a list of in-context neologisms coined in Spanish during the last 18 months by means of a previously established list of neological procedures, both formal and semantic. We asked them to what extent they considered each neologism new, they understood their meanings and they liked them. After that, we classified the neological procedures (both formal and semantic) chosen in the first part of the study and confronted them to the results of the second part of the survey. Our initial hypothesis is that Spanish speakers would be more inclined to recognize and integrate more efficiently neologisms created by means of the same formal and semantic procedures they use to coin neologisms on their own. Results obtained so far prove a prevalence of syntagmatic neology when creating new denominations, which was also one of the procedures considered as understandable and pleasant in the second part of the survey. At the same time, syntagmatic neologisms were not perceived as particularly novel by speakers.