Neologizing in American and British spoken English: the case of complex verb formation

Laws, J. (2025) Neologizing in American and British spoken English: the case of complex verb formation. Corpora. ISSN 1755-1676 (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

Complex verb formation in English is an example of densification: it involves the packaging of concepts into a single word, predominantly through the attachment of four verb-forming suffixes: -ize, -ify, -en and -ate (e.g., trivialize, ‘to regard something as trivial’, and hyphenate, ‘to insert a hyphen between words’). Complex verb neologisms (e.g., yogarize, ‘to practise yoga’) reflect speakers’ creative attempts to lexicalize events. This paper examines the forms, meanings and relative frequency of conventionalized and newly-coined complex verbs occurring in everyday American and British speech as a function of gender, age and speaker education, using an early sample of LANA-CASE, the Demographically-Sampled BNC1994 and the Spoken BNC2014. The results reveal that conventionalized complex verb usage has increased over time between the British varieties, usage profiles are linked to age and education in the BNC2014, and a weak but consistent male advantage occurs in all three corpora. Relatively more neologisms are coined overall by American speakers, young British males, American High School graduates and female undergraduates from both varieties. The results are discussed in relation to the range of meanings expressed by these novel forms as a function of language variety and sociolinguistic factors.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/129921
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics
Publisher	Edinburgh University Press
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