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Contrastive analysis of climate-related neologisms registered in GermanN and French Wikipedia
(2023)
Neologisms represent new social norms, tendencies, controversies and attitudes. They denote new or changed concepts which are constantly being negotiated between different members of the discourse community (Wodak 2022 and Catalano/Waugh (eds.) 2020). Neologisms help to identify new communicative patterns and narratives which illustrate different strings of discourse in everyday life. In recent years, many neologisms relating to the subject of the environment and climate have been emerging around the world mainly due to dominant discussions on climate change and the movement “Fridays for Future”. In German, for example, neologisms such as Klimakleber, klimaresilient and globaler Streik and in French neologisms such as éco-anxiété, justice climatique and écocitoyen could be observed. These neologisms occur in many domains of life, for example in politics, media and also in advertising, which means that “l’importance croissante des enjeux environnementaux dans les discours politiques, médiatiques et publicitaires” (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 22) can be identified. However, it is not only the occurrence of environment- or climate-related topics that is increasing, but also the rising polarisation of the public debate. The polarisation within public discourse is based on the fact that there are opposing positions which are represented by new or recently relevant terms such as activistes du climat (or Klimaaktivisten) and climatosceptiques (or Klimaskeptiker) (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 22). Due to different identifications with one or the other side, one can also speak of an “affrontement idéologique” (Balnat/Gérard 2022, p. 23). 1 The explosive nature and the high complexity of the debate on climate and the environmental issues mean that many words are naturally unfamiliar to people. This is especially true with regard to neologisms. In addition, it is often not only the new word itself but also the signified concept that is initially unknown. When people then look up words, they often do so on the Internet. Wikipedia as a “free encyclopedia” (Wikipedia 2023) is particularly well suited as an object of study with regard to neologisms, since factual knowledge is given special attention there. Furthermore, this reference guide is perceived as a regular source of agreed and common knowledge on all sorts of subjects. Hence, the descriptions found here represent social agreement on controversial terms and discussions to some degree. In this paper, German and French neologisms from the subject area of climate and environment will be examined primarily in Wikipedia, but also in the neighbouring resource Wiktionary,2 which is “a collaborative project to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary” (Wiktionary 2023). Since Wikipedia and Wiktionary are available in French and in German, 21010. International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC) both are equally suitable for the contrastive analysis. Thus, Wikipedia articles which are accessible in both languages (e.g. Klimanotstand and État d›urgence climatique) or Wikipedia articles about similar events and phenomena (e.g. Letzte Generation and Dernière Rénovation) will be compared. For example, we will have a closer look at other new terms specifying different thematic aspects of the discourse of climate and environment. We will mainly refer to those lexical items which can be found in the respective articles in both languages. Special emphasis will be on overlaps and differences, thematic foci, speaker’s positions and evaluative terms.
This paper focuses on standardological and lexicographical aspects of Coronavirus-related neologisms in Croatian. The presented results are based on corpus analysis. The initial corpus for this analysis consists of terms collected for the Glossary of Coronavirus. This corpus has been supplemented by terms we collected on the Internet and from the media. The General Croatian corpora: Croatian Web Corpus – hrWaC (cf. Ljubešić/Klubička 2016) and Croatian Language Repository (cf. Brozović Rončević/Ćavar 2008: 173–186) were also used, but since they do not include neologisms that entered the language after 2013, they could be used only to check terms in the language before that time. From October 2021, a specialized Corona corpus compiled by Štrkalj Despot and Ostroški Anić (2021) became publicly available on request. The data from these corpora are analyzed by Sketch Engine (cf. Kilgarriff et al. 2004: 105–116), a corpus query system loaded with the corpora, enabling the display of lexeme context through concordances and (differential) word sketches and the extraction of keywords (terms) and N-grams. The most common collocations are sorted into syntactic categories. For English equivalents, in addition to the sources found on the Internet, enTenTen2020 corpus was consulted. In the second part of the paper, we analyze and compare the presentation of Coronavirus terminology in the descriptive Glossary of Coronavirus and the normative Croatian Web Dictionary – Mrežnik.
Within the scope of the project "Study and dissemination of COVID-19 terminology", the study reported here aims to detect, analyse and discuss the characteristics of COVID-19 terminology, in particular the role of the adjective novo [new] in this terminology, the high recurrence of terms in the plural and the resemantization of some of the terminological units used. The present paper also discusses how these characteristics influenced the choices that have guided the creation of the proposed dictionary. This paper presents, therefore, the results of the analyses of these aspects, starting with a discussion of the relation between terminology and neology and arriving at the characteristic aspects of the macrostructural and microstructural choices about which some considerations were made.
This paper aims at verifying if the most important online Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries include some of the neologisms identified in texts published in the 1990s to 2000s, formed with the elements ciber-, e-, bio-, eco- and narco, which we refer to as fractomorphemes / fracto-morphèmes. Three online dictionaries were analyzed (Aulete, Houaiss and Michaelis), as well as Vocabulário Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa (VOLP). We were able to conclude that all three dictionaries and VOLP include neologisms with these elements; Michaelis and VOLP do not include separate entries for bound morphemes, whereas Houaiss includes entries for all of them and Aulete includes entries for bio-, eco- and narco-. Aulete also describes the neological meaning of eco- and narco-, whereas Houaiss does not.
Between January 2020 and July 2021, many new words and phrases contributed to the expansion of the German vocabulary to enable communication under the new conditions that evolved during the Covid-19 pandemic. Medical and epidemiological vocabulary was integrated into the general language to a large extent. Suddenly, some lexemes from general language were used with very high frequency, while other words were used less often than before. These processes of language change can be studied in various ways, for example, in corpus linguistics with respect to the frequency or emergence of certain words in certain types of texts (e.g. press releases vs. posts in social media), in critical discourse analysis with respect to certain participants of the discourse (e.g. vocabulary of Covid-19 pandemic deniers), or in conversation analysis (e.g. with respect to new verbal interactions in greetings and farewells). The rapid expansion of vocabulary has notably affected also lexicography as a discipline of applied linguistics.
This article will focus on the ways in which a German neologism dictionary project has chosen to capture and document lexicographic information in a timely manner. Both challenges and advantages arise from lexicographic practice “at the pulse of time”. The Neologismenwörterbuch is presented as an example that lends itself well to such a discussion because its subject (neologisms) is characterized as new, innovative, and constantly changing.
Between January 2020 and summer 2021, many new words and phrases contributed to the expansion of the German vocabulary in order to enable communication under the new conditions during the corona pandemic. This rapid expansion of vocabulary has most notably affected lexicography as a discipline of applied linguistics. General language dictionaries or terminological dictionaries have quickly reflected on how the German lexicon evolved during the corona pandemic: new entries were added, others were revised. This paper, however, focuses on the ways in which a German (specialized) neologism dictionary project, the "Neologismenwörterbuch" at the "Leibniz Institute for the German Language, Mannheim" published (online, see https://www.owid.de/docs/neo/start.jsp) has chosen to capture and document lexicographic information in a timely manner. Neologisms are (following the definition applied here) lexical units or senses/meanings which emerge in a language community over a specific period of time of language development, which diffuse, are generally accepted as language norms, and which the majority of speakers perceive as new for some time. Thus, the "Neologismenwörterbuch" used to record neologisms only retrospectively, that is after their lexicalization. As a consequence, users of the dictionary were often not able to obtain details on words that were particularly conspicuous at a particular time in a specific discourse, thus raising questions concerning their meaning, correct spelling, etc. This, however, did not imply that the lexicographers of the project had not already collected these words with some preliminary information in a list of candidates for inclusion in an internal database. Therefore, the project started to publish online an index of monitored words including lexical units that had emerged since 2011, for which only time will tell whether they will diffuse and manifest as language norms. This list format was used since April 2020 to also issue a compilation of corona-related neologisms as part of the "Neologismenwörterbuch". In October 2021, this inventory included more than 1.800 Corona-related neologisms, and still, more than 700 candidates in an internal database awaited lexicographic description and inclusion into the online index (see https://www.owid.de/docs/neo/listen/corona.jsp). In this paper many examples are presented to illustrate how new words, new senses and new uses in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic are reflected in the dictionary.
The syntagma gel hidroalcohólico ‘hydroalcoholic gel’ or the noun hidroalcohol ‘hydroalcohol’ cannot be found in Diccionario de la lengua española (DLE) of the Real Academia Española (‘Royal Spanish Academy’) or other general reference dictionaries of the Spanish language. This is so despite the fact that, for well over a year and to this very day, we have not been able to do anything without first sanitising our hands with this product. It is one of the many neologisms that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought us, and these have become commonly used words that dictionaries should consider as candidates for future updates.
By looking at the dictionarisability of these neologisms, in this work we try to set their boundaries on the continuum along which they fall. “Dictionarisability” means, in our context, the greater or lesser interest of these unities regarding the updating of general language dictionaries. At both ends of this continuum, there are surprising nonce words, as well as neologisms that have recently lost their status as such because they have now been incorporated into the dictionary. To identify different groups on the continuum of pandemic neologisms, we take into account the criteria proposed in the current literature and, by so doing, we are able to assess the extent to which they are discriminatory. This will allow us to address the neological process and to reflect on the various stages of it, from the time a neologism is born until the moment it ceases to be one because it has been dictionarised. Before that, however, we present the framework of our study and refer to the mechanisms available for detecting neologisms in general and pandemic neologisms in particular.
Not only professional lexicographers, but also people without a professional background in lexicography, have reacted to the increased need for information on new words or medical and epidemiological terms being used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, corona-related glossaries published on German news websites are presented, as well as different kinds of responses from professional lexicography. They are compared in terms of the amount of encyclopaedic information given and the methods of definition used. In this context, answers to corona-related words from a German questionanswer platform are also presented and analyzed. Overall, these different reactions to a unique challenge shed light on the importance of lexicography for society and vice versa.
Not only professional lexicographers, but also people without a professional background in lexicography, have reacted to the increased need for information on new words or medical and epidemiological terms being used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, corona-related glossaries published on German news websites are presented, as well as different kinds of responses from professional lexicography. They are compared in terms of the amount of encyclopaedic information given and the methods of definition used. In this context, answers to corona-related words from a German questionanswer platform are also presented and analyzed. Overall, these different reactions to a unique challenge shed light on the importance of lexicography for society and vice versa.
This volume of Lexicographica : Series Maior focuses on lexicographic neology and neological lexicography concerning COVID-19 neologisms, featuring papers originally presented at the third Globalex Workshop on Lexicography and Neology (GWLN 2021).
The thirteen papers in this volume focus on ten languages: one Altaic (Korean), one Finno-Ugric (Hungarian), two Germanic (English and German), four Romance (French, Italian, [Brazilian and European] Portuguese and [Pan-American and European] Spanish), and one Slavic (Croatian), as well as the Sign Language of New Zealand. Specialized dictionaries of neologisms are discussed as well as general language ones, monolingual, bilingual and multilingual lexical resources, print and electronic dictionaries. Questions regarding terminology as well as general language and standard and norm regarding COVID-19 neologisms are raised and different methods of detecting candidates in media corpora, as well as by user contributions, are discussed.