The dictionarization of transgressive neologisms

Abstract

Each update of the dictionary is carefully reviewed, especially for new additions. Often, some words appear in these updates that may come as a surprise because they are not particularly frequent, while many others, with a more established usage, are left out of the dictionary. In this paper we present an analysis of words that do not appear in dictionaries, built with the Spanish suffixes -ez and -ismo, and with the form euro-, which, in addition, present some transgression factors in their construction. Thus, we review in what sense the word-formation rule is broken, we evaluate the pragmatic effect they achieve, and we compare the analogous cases that have reached the dictionary and those that are left out, also considering the frequency of appearance in the corpus. The results of this analysis show how the continuous transgressions of a rule end up modifying it, so that the original restrictions are altered, in general, with a tendency to reduce them. This change reverts in the dictionary, which incorporates the words resulting from the extended rule, stabilizing what a priori would be considered transgressive forms.