Analogy in Word-formation by Elisa Mattiello

Author:Elisa Mattiello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The data reported in Table 6 shows the distribution of the specialised terms selected for qualitative analysis. In particular, it shows that the words occur in various genres and modes, rather than being confined to academic written text. As far as COCA is concerned, in order of frequency, 53.70% occur in academic texts, 46.29% in magazines, 42.59% in fiction texts, 35.18% in newspapers, and 27.77% in spoken discourse. Interestingly, 85.18% of the specialised terms selected occur in GloWbE, while only one term (infobot) is unattested in either corpora, despite its being recorded in the OED, whereas fashionaholic, SOD, and shopgasm are only attested in the Urban Dictionary.

The data of Table 6 is visualised in Figures 3 and 4. The former includes all new analogical words in Table 6, whereas the latter shows only the most frequent ones.

The massive occurrence of some of these terms in corpora – outgoing records 1,975 occurrences (4.48 pmw) in COCA and 9,704 (5.10 pmw) in GloWbE, top-down occurs 777 times (1.76 pmw) in COCA, and offline occurs even 14,247 (7.49 pmw) in GloWbE – confirms their actual level of representativeness as intended neologisms. There are very few exceptions of unattested words in COCA, such as Eurosterling or cancelbot, and yet whose establishment is documented in the OED (cf. Euro- and -bot).

Fig. 3: Visualisation of all data from Table 6 As far as the model words are concerned, 59.25% of the new words occur together with their models, either/both as anaphoric analogies (100%) or/and as cataphoric anticipations of the model words (84.37%). The percentage of words which occur both as anaphoric and as cataphoric analogies is 75%, although some specialised terms (27.77% in my list) exophorically allude to an external model with no need for its explicit mention.

Fig. 4: Visualisation of the most frequent words in Table 6

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