Investigating the Circumstances of Coinage

In studying lexis and lexico-grammar in a large, diachronic text corpus, it is possible to observe the “life-cycle” of new words (Renouf, 2013), but the circumstances of coinage are typically hazy. Such information is of use to lexicologists, and the aim of this study is to pinpoint and analyse new word coinages in a corpus of 1.5 billion words of UK newspaper texts from 1984 to 2014. (http://wse1.webcorp.org.uk/).Firstly, candidate neologisms are automatically identified, and the marking of their birth by coinage signals like new word is studied manually. Next, signals are extracted from Bauer’s (2001) list of potential words, and their functionality tested as markers of potential coinage. Thirdly, a set of likely signals is used to extract words and phrases later in their life-cycle. Finally, the sampled data are organised into a typological framework.Our findings at this point are that there are few signalled coinages in the data sampled. Equally, coinage signalling is often imponderable, for reasons such as functional ambiguity (denotational, stylistic, rhetorical). Nevertheless, a working typology of coinage based on signalling does seem to emerge.