engleski

Not all that glitters is new: Coroneologisms and the recency fallacy

The new normal of the Covid-19 time has unleashed a tremendous amount of playfulness and creativity, making it easier to cope with the pandemic. Not surprisingly, they manifest themselves linguistically, too. In addition to activating the usual conceptual metaphors and metonymies the pandemic brought a number of vocabulary items that are neologisms (or coroneologisms, as they are called by Roig-Marín, 2021), i.e. new words (in most cases realised formally as compounds, lexical blends, clippings), or quite common ones but used in a new way, making them more polysemous. As for their structure, they could be single words, morphologically simple or complex, or multi-word units. Strictly speaking, many of the words we consider to be neologisms are not genuine neologisms. This is not because novel-looking items are actually recycled from already existing words in ways that may make them look more or less similar to their origins, but simply because these words were coined and used before the coronavirus crisis. In other words, they qualify as pseudo-neologisms. The fact that they are felt to be novel is due to the so-called recency illusion or fallacy. Strengthened by the belief that we live in “unprecedented times”, we expect that unprecedented events naturally call for unprecedented words. The picture is, however, more complex and the phenomenon of pseudo-neology needs to be situated in the complex context of the interplay of a number of vector-like factors, such as intertextuality, culturonomic dynamicity, the phenomenon of the recency fallacy accompanied by the frequency fallacy or illusion, and the influence of various types of media and social networks on linguistic processes, especially their repetitive character.

Neologism ; Recency fallacy ; Pseudo-neologism

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