We present a method for identifying English lexical blends — words such as complisult (compliment + insult) and globesity (global + obesity) — from social media, specifically Twitter. Our method is based on observations about words and phrases that are commonly used to introduce new words and corpus patterns that are often used to describe the meaning of lexical blends, and leverages the massive volume of data that is readily-available for analysis through Twitter. We run our method for 5 weeks and identify 976 candidate lexical blends; analysis of a sample of these candidates indicates that approximately 57% are blends. We further discuss a small number of blends identified by our method that are in regular usage on Twitter but which are not recorded in any of a number of dictionaries searched.
Session
Other topics
Keywords
lexical blends, neologisms, computational lexicography, social media, Twitter
BibTex
@InProceedings{ELX12-081, author = {Paul Cook}, title = {Using social media to find English lexical blends}, pages = {846--854}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th EURALEX International Congress}, year = {2012}, month = {aug}, date = {7-11}, address = {Oslo,Norway}, editor = {Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld and Julie Matilde Torjusen}, publisher = {Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo}, isbn = {978-82-303-2228-4}, }
