Tracing lexical productivity and creativity in the British media: the chavs and the chav-nots’

Authors

  • Antoinette Renouf Birmingham City University

Keywords:

productivity, creativity, diachronic studies, journalism, word life-cycle.

Abstract

This paper analyses the processes of lexical productivity and creativity in electronically-held journalistic texts published from 1989 to 2005 with the help of the WebCorp. Departing from the observation of some recent lexical coinages and revived uses either produced or cited by journalists in British newspapers, it discusses the concepts of productivity and creativity in the light of modern diachronic corpus studies. Over 700 million words or tokens were examined. The analysis indicates that some words are more likely to succeed than others, reaching a longer life-cycle.

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Author Biography

Antoinette Renouf, Birmingham City University

Diretora do ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Mediaeval English), membro do corpo editorial da série “Translation and text Technology” da Mouton de Gruyter e do periódico “Journal Lingvisticae investigationes” da John Benjamins. Atua nas áreas de Linguística de Corpus, lexicografia, análise automática de textos e suas aplicações no gerenciamento do conhecimento. Foi co-diretora do projeto COBUILD na Universidade de Birmingham e dirigiu sete outros projetos em Linguística de Corpus como o EPSRC e o WebCorpLSE.

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Published

2011-06-19

How to Cite

RENOUF, Antoinette. Tracing lexical productivity and creativity in the British media: the chavs and the chav-nots’. MATRAGA - Journal published by the Graduate Program in Letters at Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), Rio de Janeiro, v. 18, n. 28, 2011. Disponível em: https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/matraga/article/view/26075. Acesso em: 24 may. 2025.

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 28 (2011): Lexicon

Section

Linguistic Papers

License

Authorization

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