A Diachronic Exploration of the Harvesting of the Marine Environment to a Distinctive New Zealand English Lexicon, 1796-2005

<p><b>This study examines the lexical contribution the harvesting of the marine environment has made to a specific New Zealand English lexicon from 1795 to 2006. It draws on a range of written sources including annual government reports, periodicals, and unpublished manuscripts. The identified words are compiled into a wordlist based on historical principles, which includes definitions and numerous citations of usage. The sea coast was an area of early economic activity in New Zealand, with whaling constituting one of our earliest industries, and its practitioners some of the earliest English speaking settlers. It remains an area of continued cultural and economic significance. Therefore, the compiled wordlist provides not just a repository of long forgotten words, but an historical account of a living language in an area of continued significance to New Zealand.</b></p> <p>The body of New Zealandisms identified in this study are analysed systematically. Firstly, the lexical items are examined in seven 30 year time periods from 1796 to 2005 to determine changes in the number of innovations over time. The results show that the largest numbers of New Zealandisms were identified during the stages of early settlement, and in recent years. This suggests that New Zealand English continues to flourish at the lexical level, despite the threat which globalisation is perceived to pose to regional variation. Closer examination also reveals that lexical innovation in New Zealand is linked with New Zealand's growing sense of independence, and a dynamic orientation to the marine resource. In addition, a regional typology is applied to the identified lexis based on Deverson's (2000) model which shows when and how the innovation occurs, via coining and borrowing, or semantic shift. New words are examined to identify which word formation processes are the most productive. The categorisation reveals that lexical innovation in the area of marine harvesting is strongly focused on referents which are unique to New Zealand, and this is constant throughout the period studied. However, this reflects ongoing changes in the way that we label our unique referents, rather than the sheer number of unique referents. While new words are slightly more prevalent than semantic shift as a means of innovation in the marine domain, there is significant variation in this over time. That is, borrowing as a significant feature of lexical innovation during early European settlement is replaced in dominance by semantic shift as colonisation progresses. Since the 1970s, new words again dominate the form of lexical innovation, especially through the use of multi-word items employed to construct a complex management system. This impacts on the nature of the fisheries discourse and also our perception of the marine environment.</p> <p>The study of the contribution of the marine harvesting lexicon to New Zealand English creates a cultural document in an area of social and economic importance. It also provides a body of words which is available for analysis. The results of categorising the identified New Zealandisms contribute to our knowledge of the nature of New Zealand lexical innovation, and how it has changed throughout the European settlement of New Zealand.</p>

A Diachronic Exploration of the Harvesting of the Marine Environment to a Distinctive New Zealand English Lexicon, 1796-2005

<p><b>This study examines the lexical contribution the harvesting of the marine environment has made to a specific New Zealand English lexicon from 1795 to 2006. It draws on a range of written sources including annual government reports, periodicals, and unpublished manuscripts. The identified words are compiled into a wordlist based on historical principles, which includes definitions and numerous citations of usage. The sea coast was an area of early economic activity in New Zealand, with whaling constituting one of our earliest industries, and its practitioners some of the earliest English speaking settlers. It remains an area of continued cultural and economic significance. Therefore, the compiled wordlist provides not just a repository of long forgotten words, but an historical account of a living language in an area of continued significance to New Zealand.</b></p> <p>The body of New Zealandisms identified in this study are analysed systematically. Firstly, the lexical items are examined in seven 30 year time periods from 1796 to 2005 to determine changes in the number of innovations over time. The results show that the largest numbers of New Zealandisms were identified during the stages of early settlement, and in recent years. This suggests that New Zealand English continues to flourish at the lexical level, despite the threat which globalisation is perceived to pose to regional variation. Closer examination also reveals that lexical innovation in New Zealand is linked with New Zealand's growing sense of independence, and a dynamic orientation to the marine resource. In addition, a regional typology is applied to the identified lexis based on Deverson's (2000) model which shows when and how the innovation occurs, via coining and borrowing, or semantic shift. New words are examined to identify which word formation processes are the most productive. The categorisation reveals that lexical innovation in the area of marine harvesting is strongly focused on referents which are unique to New Zealand, and this is constant throughout the period studied. However, this reflects ongoing changes in the way that we label our unique referents, rather than the sheer number of unique referents. While new words are slightly more prevalent than semantic shift as a means of innovation in the marine domain, there is significant variation in this over time. That is, borrowing as a significant feature of lexical innovation during early European settlement is replaced in dominance by semantic shift as colonisation progresses. Since the 1970s, new words again dominate the form of lexical innovation, especially through the use of multi-word items employed to construct a complex management system. This impacts on the nature of the fisheries discourse and also our perception of the marine environment.</p> <p>The study of the contribution of the marine harvesting lexicon to New Zealand English creates a cultural document in an area of social and economic importance. It also provides a body of words which is available for analysis. The results of categorising the identified New Zealandisms contribute to our knowledge of the nature of New Zealand lexical innovation, and how it has changed throughout the European settlement of New Zealand.</p>

Social Networks of Lexical Innovation. Investigating the Social Dynamics of Diffusion of Neologisms on Twitter

Societies continually evolve and speakers use new words to talk about innovative products and practices. While most lexical innovations soon fall into disuse, others spread successfully and become part of the lexicon. In this paper, I conduct a longitudinal study of the spread of 99 English neologisms on Twitter to study their degrees and pathways of diffusion. Previous work on lexical innovation has almost exclusively relied on usage frequency for investigating the spread of new words. To get a more differentiated picture of diffusion, I use frequency-based measures to study temporal aspects of diffusion and I use network analyses for a more detailed and accurate investigation of the sociolinguistic dynamics of diffusion. The results show that frequency measures manage to capture diffusion with varying success. Frequency counts can serve as an approximate indicator for overall degrees of diffusion, yet they miss important information about the temporal usage profiles of lexical innovations. The results indicate that neologisms with similar total frequency can exhibit significantly different degrees of diffusion. Analysing differences in their temporal dynamics of use with regard to their age, trends in usage intensity, and volatility contributes to a more accurate account of their diffusion. The results obtained from the social network analysis reveal substantial differences in the social pathways of diffusion. Social diffusion significantly correlates with the frequency and temporal usage profiles of neologisms. However, the network visualisations and metrics identify neologisms whose degrees of social diffusion are more limited than suggested by their overall frequency of use. These include, among others, highly volatile neologisms (e.g., poppygate) and political terms (e.g., alt-left), whose use almost exclusively goes back to single communities of closely-connected, like-minded individuals. I argue that the inclusion of temporal and social information is of particular importance for the study of lexical innovation since neologisms exhibit high degrees of temporal volatility and social indexicality. More generally, the present approach demonstrates the potential of social network analysis for sociolinguistic research on linguistic innovation, variation, and change.

The Subjugation of Women through Lexical Innovation in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Given the importance of novel formations in science and speculative fiction, the aim of this paper is to analyse a selection of morphosemantic and semantic neologisms that occur in the feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), namely those items more closely connected with women’s lives. These items are gathered, classified and discussed by resorting to the tools provided by Morphology, Lexical Semantics, Onomastics and Women’s Studies. Therefore, the paper explores how new names for people (Econowives, Offred), activities (Particicution), artifacts (Birthmobile) and places (the Colonies) play a part in the linguistic task of female subjugation. It shows how in a fictional republic where gender roles and religious totalitarianism are taken to extremes, the forms and meanings of words are manipulated to enhance power relations and gender inequality, impose an orthodox frame of mind (comply with the system), and avoid uncomfortable truths. Neologisms provide a sense of authenticity in the narrative and show how language evolves to satisfy various needs, not only pragmatic, but also social, ideological and euphemistic.

French Lexical Innovation in Moroccan Mediated Interactions

The French language in Morocco seems to be an evolving research field for linguists and sociolinguists. In everyday chats, Moroccan speakers use a particular lexicon of French on a formal and informal semantic level without much concern for conformity with standard French.Based on a one-off observation of exchange situations, we carried out a qualitative descriptive analysis based on studying the form and meaning of neologisms in the mediated interactions of the users. This study demonstrated a great diversity of lexicon use in the atypical written speeches of Moroccan chatters as well as an important freedom of spelling in relation to standard. The language practices of these chatters testify creative vitality and dynamics of neologisms. It also appears that these practices perform expressive, playful, and ornamental functions.

Лексические инновации в мемосфере: названия мемных жанров

The development of the Internet gave life to Internet memes. Their diversity and rapid growth contributed to the formation of the memosphere, the development of which is accompanied by the emergence of lexical innovations. These include language memes and the names of meme genres. All of them are the result of linguistic creativity, which in relation to the names of meme genres, covers several stages: English loanwords for the name of the meme genre, their adaptation in Russian, changes in semantics, and preference for specific neologisms. The concept of lexical innovation was apprehended on the foundation of Markovsky’s concept. The study of lexical innovations was carried out within the framework of the structural-semantic direction, as well as on the basis of the theory of Kotelova and the concepts of Rakhmanova and Suzdaltseva. Studies have shown that semantic changes in the names of meme genres are associated with a denotation change. Changes in the semantics of word loaning are very dynamic as English loanwords enable the swift naming of new realities. This tendency towards the internationalization of vocabulary is related to the Internet and the memosphere. The obtained results fill the gap in the study of vocabulary related to the memosphere. A few studies of meme genres relate to their description and analysis, yet do not focus on the semantic and graphic modification of loanwords. This work presents the unprecedented mechanisms and stages of the formation of meme genres names.