0000000000204343
AUTHOR
Alexandra Bagasheva
The ludic aspect of lexical inventiveness
In this paper we argue that coining new words is inherently ludic. Wehypothesize that naming (the onomasiological part of the creation of words)functions as a modern form of aporia (the riddle). We propose to interpret nonceformations as the initial stage of any new word both as a temporal and as aspatial notion. Once used in communicative interaction, a word is launched onits paths of socialization, instantiated by institutionalization and lexicalization.As there are no grounds for a sharp distinction between ‘ludic’ and ‘ordinary’words, we postulate ludicity as a third dimension of socialization for whicheach word is characterized
Foreword: New territories in word-formation
Word-formation is a domain of linguistics which has steadily evolved in the last decades under the influence of the wide availability of electronic corpora and of a renewed interest in contrastive approaches to morphological analysis. From the 1990s onwards, morphological studies have increasingly relied on corpus data. An initial point of interest was the domain of productivity measurement (see Baayen & Lieber 1991, Baayen & Renouf 1996), but resorting to corpora soon became a widespread practice, notably to document rare phenomena, which cannot be thoroughly discussed in the absence of a wealth of data (see Plénat et al. 2002).