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Category: Project

Description: The neological intuition is an intuition felt by the speakers that a given word in a given language is new. This phenomenon depends on the mental lexicon and 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. This study aims to determine some of the linguistical factors that influence the neological intuition of French native speakers with a quantitative approach. More precisely the study determines with a yes/no task and an identification task during sentence reading if the neological intuition varies according to the nature of the word formation process, focusing on whether the neologism has a formal change or not regarding the base and whether the neologism is created by a regular or an irregular word formation process. The chosen categories of neologisms – morphological and semantical – have the advantage of including both irregular and regular neologisms, counter to the other categories – for example phraseological neologisms or loanwords. There are few previous studies about neological intuition in French (Gardin et al. 1974, Sablayrolles 2003, Ben Hariz Ouenniche 2009). They focus on increasing the agreement rate of linguists in a task of neologism detection and description in a given corpus and they analyse the data in a qualitative and descriptive way. Our study isn’t part of the performance of the lexicologists but fits in a broader framework on the correlation between cognitive structures of speakers and categories of neologisms. It should therefore help to better understand the practice of everyday language and the mechanisms of reception and comprehension of linguistic forms.