Book review

Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts

Munat, Judith (ed.) 2007. Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins

Reviewed by Réka Benczes, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts is a collection of twelve articles on the creation of new words and how the creation of these words is constrained by their surrounding context. Two issues need to be clarified: what should be considered as a "new word" and what do we mean by "context"? Bauer (2001) establishes three categories of words: existing words (which exist from the moment they are coined); item-familiar words (words that are familiar to individual speakers, without having become a part of the norm of the language); and established words (once a word is item-familiar to a large enough subset of the speech community to make it worth listing in reference works). Choosing the last option, that is, the class of established words to determine whether a coinage is an "existing" word, has a large pitfall: not all of the words of a language are listed in reference works. The class of item-familiar words exhibits a somewhat similar problem: just because a newly coined word is not as familiar as cat or mat, it does not directly follow that the word in question should not be considered as an existing word of a given language. A word should be taken as an existing word from the moment it is coined, whether or not it will become established later on. It is this liberal approach that is applied in this volume.

As Munat (p. xiii) emphasizes, "[t]he majority of coinages examined here will never find a place in the lexicon because of their ephemeral nature, their utility being strictly bound to their original contexts of use." Yet the fact that a word or expression does not gain a permanent position in the lexicon does not mean that it should not be investigated. One of the most important observations that can be drawn from the volume is that the investigation of these "ephemeral" coinages can shed considerable light on the current status of English word formation.

In fact, it is one of the greatest assets of the volume that the contributions vividly reflect the fascinating creativity that we encounter on a daily basis – and it is here that we should turn back to the issue of "context". The term applies to both the textual environment, and the larger social environment, and - at the same time - it also encompasses our own individual interpretation of the world around us. All of these affect the creation of new words – in fact, it is only through the analysis of this context that we can safely describe what word formation is and what motivates it. In order to demonstrate this point, the twelve articles of the volume base their data on a very wide range of sources (such as contemporary fiction, children's literature, advertisements, newspapers, cartoon strips, etc.) and on a very wide range of word formation processes (compounding, affixation, shortening, blends, idiom transformation, etc.). In the following, I will provide a brief review of each of the papers and how they contribute to the main objective of the volume.

The first contribution in the volume by Lipka aims to delimit the notions of text and context, as these, according to the author, are not used in the same way by everybody and therefore "require a nominal definition" (p. 4). In this sense, Lipka's paper is a very useful introduction to the volume, as it provides the reader with considerable theoretical support when reading the subsequent chapters. Yet it might be added here that while Lipka's aim is highly commendable, the authors in the volume do not necessarily conform to his definitions all the time, thus detracting from his objectives.

The title of the first section of the volume, Lexical creativity in discourse, is perhaps slightly misleading, as the influence of discourse on the creation of new words can be said to be the topic of every single paper in the volume. Nevertheless, both contributions in this section are highly engaging pieces. Hohenhaus looks at the motivations behind inventing new words (other than naming), such as hypostatisation (naming something that does not exist in reality) – used, for instance, in science fiction narratives – or attention seeking (such as wordplay in newspaper headlines). He brings forth examples from newspaper articles, contemporary fiction and television series, among other sources, to demonstrate that creative word formation is a routine process that permeates through various genres. The other contribution in this section, by Hay, examines New Zealand spoken discourse: how the length of the prefix un- depends on the decomposability of the word. Correspondingly, the length of un- in a more recent addition to the lexicon, such as unburstable, takes a longer time to pronounce than in a lexicalised word such as unfortunate.

The five contributions in the second section of the volume, Lexical creativity in texts, limit their analysis to creative word formation in a particular textual environment. Renouf, for instance, investigates lexical productivity and creativity in British journalistic text, which is often creative in the sense that it employs word play, humour, irony, etc. One of her most interesting observations concerns the life-cycle of words: namely, that "[a] highly topical or fashionable word or phrase is typically accompanied not just by a flurry of productivity but also of creativity" (p. 71), yet not all new coinages enjoy the same level of success. To use Bauer's (2001) terminology once again, whether an existing word becomes an item-familiar and then an established term in the media depends solely on how well it can "further the media cause" (p. 87).

Kuiper's contribution investigates the cartoon strips of Cathy Wilcox: how the artist manipulates phrasal lexical items for a humorous effect. Both Renouf and Kuiper point out that the "deformation" of an already existing lexical item in order to create a novel word or phrase – either in journalese or in the case of a cartoon strip – does have its limitations: there must remain sufficient clues for the reader to detect the original lexical item; otherwise, the pun is lost.

Lehrer rightly argues that in the morphological literature blends have been neglected for a rather long time as purely marginal elements (although see for example Kemmer's (2003) analysis of blends from a cognitive linguistic perspective). Lehrer asks why blends are so popular nowadays. According to her, as a form of wordplay, they are similar to rhymes and allusions in the sense that blends are "cute and amusing" (p. 115). They are easy to create, yet instantly grab our attention, and hence they are often used in the media. Her taxonomy of the different types of blends is a rather useful addition to this neglected area of morphology.

López Rúa's paper on new lexical items found in electronic communication (such as mobile phones and the Internet) makes it apparent that speakers routinely employ metaphors when creating new terms for concepts (such as cookie, bug, hamster ["tailless mouse"], etc.). Although the description of the morphological processes used in creating new terms (affixation, compounding, etc.) provides a fine overview of the issue, I did miss a reference to the cognitive processes involved (conceptual metaphor or metonymy), as their role was very much apparent in the data.

Munat looked at the motivations behind the creation of new words in science fiction on the one hand, and children's literature on the other, in order to uncover how style affects morphological creativity. Accordingly, science fiction uses mainly complex pseudo-scientific words that require considerable processing effort from the reader, as opposed to children's literature, where the motivation for novel words is based on phonological considerations (rhymes, alliterations, phonaesthemes, etc.).

The two papers in the third section of the volume, Creative concept formation, offer insight into the mechanism of the online lexical processing of new words. Veale gives a formalistic account of how analogy plays a highly significant part in this process, while Porto demonstrates how categories are constantly readjusted to accommodate newly encountered coinages.

The last section in the volume, Sociopolitical effects on creativity, extends the notion of "context" into the social sphere: not as an individual, but as a "social practice" (Fischer, p. 264). Veisbergs's contribution is a convincing account of how the social environment has a direct effect on linguistic creativity: as the author notes, during the Soviet era, any creative manipulation of Latvian, even the use of novel metaphors, was considered as "reactionary" (p. 243). However, from the 1990s onwards, due to the increasing influence of Western media, Latvian has become increasingly "democratized" (p. 248): wordplay, idiom transformations, clippings and blends, and nonce compounding are now considered to be routine in the language.

The last paper of the volume, by Fischer, examines the limits of creativity in politically correct expressions as suggested by style manuals. She comes to the conclusion that "language purism has a negative effect on lexical, or even critical, creativity" (p. 280), as although there are countless possibilities on offer, politically correct terms do not seem to exploit the full potential of language.

Evaluation

The papers in the volume investigate perhaps the most exciting area of morphology: the creation of new words. They do so by placing word formation into the context of the individual and the social environment, and claim that this context has a strong limiting function in what sort of new expressions are invented by the speakers (and how this is done). While in some of the papers a taxonomical account was given perhaps more weight than it was absolutely necessary, the findings of the volume are insightful and the wealth of data is very impressive. Although only a very few authors of the volume make reference to the cognitive linguistic literature (if at all), the papers can easily complement current and future morphological studies within a cognitive linguistic framework, thanks to the holistic approach that is pervasive throughout the volume.

References

Bauer, Laurie. 2001. Morphological Productivity [Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 95]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kemmer, Suzanne. 2003. Schemas and lexical blends. In Motivation in Language: Studies in Honor of Günter Radden, H. Cuyckens, Th. Berg, R. Dirven and K.-U. Panther (eds.), 69–97. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Links

© 2002-present ICLA; all rights reserved.
Site admin information and contact