IFA Friday Lectures, 20 April, 13.30 p.m. room 601

The reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) verb has been the subject of lively and often intense debate over the past 40 years, yet the implications of this research are rarely reflected or even mentioned in specialist work on individual Indo-European branches, including Germanic. I briefly summarize the main schools of thought on the PIE verb, with special emphasis on the "h₂e-conjugation" theory developed by Jasanoff (2003). The lecture then examines two perennial problems of Germanic verbal morphology and their reinterpretation in light of the h2e-conjugation theory: the origin of the preterite-presents, recently the topic of a monograph by Tanaka (2011); and the o-vocalism of the West Germanic verb 'do' (OE dōn, OHG tuon), which has never received a satisfactory explanation in Indo-European terms. In closing, the possible contribution of Germanic to the reconstruction of PIE verb morphology will be assessed, e.g. the proposal of Ringe (2012) that the h2e-conjugation was in fact a subjunctive in the protolanguage.

The aim of this study is to gain an insight into current trends in creative language use on the level of morphology by means of building and examining a database of formal neologisms and nonce formations. For this purpose, a special web-based application called NeoDet was developed. The application served the following three functions: compilation of a study corpus, neologism detection, as well as neologism management. Firstly, NeoDet was used to compile a study corpus of journalistic texts comprising articles and blogs from the most widely read British broadsheets and tabloids. Secondly, the application was used to semi-automatically extract formal neologism candidates from the study corpus following a procedure based on the exclusion principle. The exclusion sources included a few online dictionaries, four slang dictionaries, the British National Corpus, and a wordlist of proper names and geographical names. Only when a lexical item was absent from all the exclusion sources was it regarded as a neologism candidate. Each neologism candidate was then verified manually and the whole noisy output (e.g. typographical errors, proper names) was discarded. Thirdly, NeoDet helped to manage the resultant list of neologisms which were later analyzed and categorized according to formal and semantic criteria. Additionally, once a new lexical item coined by means of affixation was discovered, the NeoDet search engine was used in order to establish the degree of productivity exhibited by a given prefix or suffix. In this way, studying nonce formations and neologisms made it possible to uncover English productive affixes and draw conclusions concerning their meanings. Furthermore, the study shed light on some of the strategies adopted by journalists in order to attract public attention. All in all, new lexical items are coined not only to compensate for the denotational deficiency of a language, but also with the purpose of being eye- and ear-catching, witty, amusing and memorable. Finally, several practical implications arise from the study, which could lead to a better treatment of creative patterns of usage in pedagogical dictionaries.