It’s a long way to a dictionary: Towards a corpus-based dictionary of neologisms

Page 597-606
Author Vasiliki Afentoulidou, Anastasia Christofidou
Title It’s a long way to a dictionary: Towards a corpus-based dictionary of neologisms
Abstract In this paper we discuss three main different views on the documentation of neologisms supporting the construction of a corpus-based lexicon of neologisms (as a language resource), which will include those new lexical units that enter the consolidation stage (according to certain criteria) before their entering into the establishment stage (Kerremans 2015). The documentation (collection and monitoring) of those new lexical units will be both linguistically and lexicographically helpful: a. it provides the linguist with a valuable linguistic information tank (morphology, semantics, morphology-text interface etc.) and b. it facilitates the answer to the desideratum of the dictionary inclusion (or not) of neologisms. We focus on the second issue and show that corpus exploration methods and measurements such as peakedness of distributions and lexical dispersion can be operationalized as tangible criteria to conjointly evaluate the frequency profiles of new formations, and that peakedness is a promising indicator of “lexical sustainability”. Drawing examples from a 160-million-word sub-corpus of the Monitor Corpus of Neologisms compiled for ???????? research project at the Academy of Athens, comprising newspaper discourse spanning 5.4 years, we track the frequency development of selected new formations which emerged during the Greek debt crisis and discuss their evolution in time.
Session Neology
Keywords neology; dictionary inclusion; corpora; consolidation; peakedness; dispersion
BibTex 
@inproceedings{ELX2020_2021-062,
address = {Alexandroupolis},
title = {It’s long way to a dictionary: {Towards} a corpus-based dictionary of neologisms},
isbn = {978-618-85138-2-2},
url = {https://www.euralex.org/elx_proceedings/Euralex2020-2021/EURALEX2020-2021_Vol2-p597-606.pdf},
language = {en},
booktitle = {Lexicography for {Inclusion}: {Proceedings} of the 19th {EURALEX} {International} {Congress}, 7-9 {September} 2021, {Alexandroupolis}, {Vol}. 2},
publisher = {Democritus University of Thrace},
author = {Afentoulidou, Vasiliki and Christofidou, Anastasia},
editor = {Mitits, Lydia and Kiosses, Sypros},
year = {2021},
pages = {597--606},}
Download