[Corpora-List] Neologisms

[Mark Davies]

(Sorry for the delay in responding)

In order to look for neologisms, you'll need a monitor corpus that continues to be added to every year or two, and (crucially) which has roughly the same composition from year to year. As far as I'm aware, the only publicly-accessible monitor corpus with these specifications in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ .

(See http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/4/447.abstract for a comparison of COCA, the Bank of English, and the Oxford English Corpus as monitor corpora.)

The hard part is having the corpus interface automatically find neologisms for you. In COCA you can have it show you, for example, all adjectives that occur in 2012, but not in 1990-2011. But because the CLAWS7 tagger isn't perfect, you'll have to wade through lots of spurious data to find the neologisms.

But if you already have words or phrases in mind, then COCA can map out their frequency year by year since 1990 quite well, e.g.:

morph: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?h=y&c=coca&q=105
old-school: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?h=y&c=coca&q=106
gift (as verb): http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?h=y&c=coca&q=124
think outside the box: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?h=y&c=coca&q=155
throw someone under the bus: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=15643189

There are more examples at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/x.asp?f=changes_e

Best,

Mark Davies


============================================
Mark Davies
Professor of Linguistics / Brigham Young University
http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/

** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
============================================

________________________________
From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [corpora-bounces at uib.no] on behalf of kazavora at students.unibe.ch [kazavora at students.unibe.ch]
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 7:52 AM
To: corpora at uib.no
Subject: [Corpora-List] Neologisms

Dear all,

I am doing a corpus about neologism, looking at new words that evolved in the last couple of years and the word-formation process they went throught. Therefore I need a source where I can find all the new words that evolved in the last couple of years or the last decade. Do you have any helpful links, etc.

Thank you very much.

Best wishes,

Karoline Zavora
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