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Foreign languages : a journal of applied linguistics, Vol. 45. No. 3-4., 2016.

Original scientific paper

LEXICAL INNOVATIONS IN SWEDISH BETWEEN 2000 AND 2016

Edin Badić
Sandra Ljubas orcid id orcid.org/0000-0002-9946-9719

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Abstract

This paper examines lexical innovations in Swedish between 2000 and 2016 with respect to word classes, word-formation processes and donor languages. Since 2000, the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore has annually published online glossaries of new words and phrases in current language use. They were compiled into a monolingual Swedish corpus, comprising 1100 innovations the authors analyzed to test the following hypotheses: (1) the majority of innovations are nouns, (2) compounding is the most frequent word-formation process among the original innovations, and (3) the borrowed innovations predominantly stem from English. They were analyzed qualitatively (word classes, grammatical features, formation processes) and quantitatively. The findings have generally confirmed the hypotheses: the corpus includes 816 nouns (74% of all new lexemes), 347 original compounds (31.55%) and 385 Anglicisms (>90% of all loanwords). While most of the innovations have become stable, some of them have remained at the level of nonce words.

Keywords

lexical innovations; word-formation processes; compounding; borrowing

Hrčak ID:

193100

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/193100

Publication date:

15.12.2017.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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