Theoretical Issues and Practical Difficulties in Processing Neologisms

Résumé 0

The difficulties that arise with collecting neologisms, individually or collectively, manually or automatically, come from the diversity of the terms and the theoretical problems concerning their statute. Excluding a term from a corpus is a delicate question. One risks to leave out a good deal of formal neologisms, and a fortiori, other types of neologisms such as those of a semantic or syntactic character, and those created by lexical combinations or by deviation. Observed variations of what people see as neologisms are not completely random: they are due partly to the people themselves, partly to lexical matrices. One can try to build a scale of neologicity. What is left to be done, is the social acceptation of the neologism, its life span (from when to when?), not considering its unforeseen trajectories.