Dictionarization of Catalan Neologisms

The dictionarisation of neologisms is not a new line of research, since it was the focus of Barnhart’s² work on searching for new words for dictionaries, and also of Sheidlower’s³ work on the principles for the inclusion of neologisms in academic dictionaries. And, in the new millennium, works by Ishikawa,⁴ and O’Donovan and O’Neill⁵ were published; these are also reference works for any studies related to this line of research. Without necessarily using the word dictionarisation, these works on how neologisms might be taken into account for the purpose of updating dictionaries (especially monolingual general dictionaries) can be found in the Anglophone literature, where lexicographical inclusion is the final step of the institutionalisation process, which has been studied to a considerable extent in that setting. Since Bauer,⁶ who saw the institutionalisation of a neologism as the step that comes after its appearance as a nonce word and the step before its lexicalisation, authors like Lipka⁷ have begun to argue that institutionalisation and lexicalisation are two independent processes that operate at different levels. It was Hohenhaus⁸ who gave us the idea of a path, in the sense that, from that first nonce occurrence, a neologism might remain only ←17 | 18→as a single footstep or, instead, begin its journey along a path. And, on reaching the end of that path, it will have become fully implanted in the speakers’ use. But it was Schmid⁹ who made the broadest proposal and gave the name establishment to the general process that takes place in three stages (creation, consolidation and establishing), and in the three subsequent levels: lexicalisation takes place at the language structure level, institutionalisation at the sociopragmatic use level, and hypostatisation of the concept at the cognitive level. Applying this reflection to dictionarisation, neologisms are dictionarisable if they complete the three stages at the three levels.

Similarly, there are no references to the form dictionarisation in the French tradition, which instead talks about lexicographisation.¹⁰ In works in Spanish within this line of research, actualización lexicográfica¹¹ [lexicographical updating] and valor lexicográfico¹² [lexicographical value] are mentioned. One of the two major strands of the research being conducted within the framework of the NEÓMETRO project¹³ is the study of dictionarisability, and it has already given rise to several forthcoming works by Bernal, Freixa, and Torner,¹⁴ and Freixa and Torner.¹⁵

←18 | 19→The mentioned works usually propose a combination of different criteria to guide the decision to include words in a dictionary. A high frequency of use is generally considered a basic criterion. Freixa¹⁶ has suggested that frequency of use should be a basic criterion that acts as a filter: the other criteria should only be applied to words with a high frequency of use, meaning that not all frequent neologisms should necessarily make their way into a dictionary. All those that do must nevertheless be frequent. Beyond frequency, various authors (especially Adelstein and Freixa)¹⁷ have proposed an articulation of four types of criteria: formal, semantic, sociolinguistic and lexicographical, and they assert that these criteria should be weighted depending on the type of dictionary being updated.

The data

Since the aim of the NADIC project was to select around 1,000 neologisms for the purpose of updating the standard dictionary of the Catalan language (herein ‘DIEC’), the data used were from the Xarxa d’Observatoris de Neologia de la Llengua Catalana [Network of Catalan-Language Neology Observatories] (NEOXOC),¹⁸ which mainly contains data from the Barcelona Observatori de Neologia.¹⁹ At the end of 2019, the Observatori de Neologia’s database (BOBNEO)²⁰ contained 77,400 different neologisms (71,000 of which came from the Barcelona observatory).

For the NADIC project, a criterion of currency was applied in the first instance, so only those neologisms from the 2008–2016 period were taken into account. Thus, the initial selection was made up of nearly 25,000 neologisms from that period. It should be noted that the Observatori de Neologia applies a lexicographical criterion to identify neologisms. Thus, as already mentioned in the introduction, some of the detected units in use (texts from the print press and magazines, and oral texts from radio outlets) gathered by the Observatori de Neologia are not new. They are considered neologisms because they do not ←19 | 20→appear in the dictionaries used as exclusion corpora (Diccionari de la llengua catalana produced by the IEC, and the Gran diccionari de la llengua catalana produced by Enciclopèdia Catalana).

To create a corpus of neologisms that, for the purpose of the analysis, was more manageable in size, several exclusion criteria were applied²¹ until a working selection of 2,462 neologisms was obtained. A set of criteria was applied to this selection, which we will present in the next section (§ The criteria). Before that, however, we would like to show the distribution of the neologisms in the sample, which we call the working selection, which refers to the 2,462 neologisms that did not fulfil the exclusion criteria (see chart 1).

As can be seen, derivation (prefixation and suffixation) is the most productive mechanism (not only in this selection, but also in the Observatori de Neologia’s set of data) and it accounts for 32.6 per cent, nearly a third of the total. Then we find borrowings from English (13.2 per cent) and, if we add the percentages of borrowings from Spanish (7.5 per cent) and other languages (6.6 per cent), the total percentage of non-vernacular words is 27.4 per cent. Neoclassical compounding (11.8 per cent), vernacular compounding (2.8 per cent) and syntagmatic compounding (5.7 per cent) together total 20.4 per cent, and semantic ←20 | 21→neology accounts for 9.2 per cent of the NADIC’s working selection. The rest of the processes (conversion, lexicalisation, truncation and others) are the least represented and together total 10.34 per cent.

The literature review enabled us to see that there was no comprehensive, articulated proposal on criteria for the selection of the best candidate words for the purpose of updating standard dictionaries. Nor was there a methodology for applying the already identified criteria. We found that there was broad consensus on frequency criteria, and that Adelstein and Freixa²² had put forward a proposal on different blocks of criteria, but the proposal was not closed and had not been systematically applied to a corpus of neologisms.

Thus, the criteria proposal designed by the NADIC is innovative and, as we shall see, useful and sufficient, but not closed or definitive. Future works should complete the proposal by refining some of the proposed criteria and by adding new ones. The resulting proposal should not be targeted at updating standard dictionaries. Rather, in the application of the criteria, the proposal should anticipate the type of dictionary being updated or developed. Most of the criteria presented below, designed for the purpose of updating the standard dictionary of the Catalan language with new, documented words in use, mainly in the print press, would be just as valid in other scenarios, but each one might have a very different value depending on the type of dictionary.

The NADIC’s criteria are grouped together and presented in three blocks: criteria of use, linguistic and thematic criteria, and criteria of documentation. In turn, they may be exclusion criteria, which, if fulfilled would automatically reject a unit, or inclusion criteria, which, if fulfilled, would have that aspect added to its dictionarisation matrix. Ultimately, only those neologisms with matrices meeting the requirements presented further below will be dictionarisable. As ←21 | 22→shown in Table 1, the proposal has 22 criteria: 10 criteria of use, seven linguistic and thematic criteria, and five criteria of documentation. In the table, the seven exclusion criteria are shaded, whereas the 15 inclusion criteria are not.