Nonce words identification strategies

Akulinina Daria

The attention of linguists to the problem of lexical innovations and the frequency of new words and occasional elements in modern literature does not disgrace. Despite the large number of linguistic works devoted to nonce words, most of them investigate this phenomenon in isolation from the person producing and understanding speech. The purpose of the study is to identify strategies of an identification of nonce words in original English-language texts using a psycholinguistic experiment. The analysis was based on general scientific and private scientific methods. As a result of a free association test, we obtained a corpus of data that allows us to conclude that lexical access to a new words/word combinations is carried out mainly on the basis of semantic and formal features. When perceiving input information (written nonce word/phrase), respondents relied on the sound or graphic form of the word, word-forming elements.

Keywords:neology, nonce words, identification strategies, literary text, psycholinguistic experiment.