Introduction New word dynamics in contemporary English Ramón Martí Solano / Raluca Nita / Vincent Renner This issue of AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik features a selection of papers presented in the thematic workshop Lexical and Phraseological Neologisms in Contemporary English during the 10 th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BI- CLCE), held at the University of Alicante (Spain) from September 26 to 28, 2024. The workshop aimed to bring together scholars studying various aspects of English neology from a synchronic perspective. Neology is a natural, ongoing, and unstoppable process in all languages that accounts for lexical innovation and speakers’ creativity. Languages are in a constant state of change and variation - they are continually renewing their lexicon not only to adapt to new realities but also to add expressiveness by means of novel forms and meanings. Neology thus involves the study of new formal units, as well as the semantic evolution of existing ones, and neologisms can be approached from all linguistic levels, primarily through the tools of morphological, semantic, and pragmatic analysis. Historically, an early concern of neology research has been to monitor whether innovative formations are integrated into the lexicon of a language, i.e. whether they are widespread and frequent enough, in oral and/ or written contexts, to become institutionalised and deemed worthy of inclusion in dictionaries. Other lines of research include detecting new analogical formations and their lexical networks, tracking the emergence and evolution of new splinters and combining forms, and exploring the links between neology and language registers, as well as pragmatic issues of interest such as euphemisation and dysphemisation. Lexical and phraseological neologisms can be approached from a wide variety of perspectives, in connection with, for example, discourse genre - e.g. literary sub- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 51 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2026-0001 Ramón Martí Solano / Raluca Nita / Vincent Renner 4 genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and dystopia (López Rúa 2021) or children’s books (Poix 2018) -, World Englishes (Anesa 2019), wordplay (Zirker & Winter-Froemel 2015), terminology (Humbley 2008), or social media (Grieve et al. 2018, Würschinger 2021). The five selected papers provide an in-depth examination of the multifaceted phenomenon of neology in contemporary English, helping the interested reader get a more comprehensive overview of the various dynamics at play, primarily in their morphological, phraseological, and metalinguistic dimensions. In the opening contribution, Chris A. Smith (Université Caen Normandie) examines affixal neology from the perspective of low-frequency lexical forms. In a corpus-based micro-diachronic approach using the 20-billion-word News on the Web corpus, she studies 197 -able adjectives (e.g. blendable, startable) and sheds light on new characteristics of the pattern that prove lexical innovation. A close examination reveals the syntactic, semantic, and morphological flexibility of the pattern and its potential for lexical innovation. A significant finding of the study is the extension of the X verb fillers beyond the transitivity pattern and the canonical verb stem to include phrasal verbs (ungetthroughable), nominal and verbal compounds (word-of-mouthable, cantoppable), and phrases (can’t-ride-without-able). The author also points out fundamental methodological issues related to corpus-based productivity assessment. For instance, she discusses the limitations of cross-dictionary referencing of conventionalisation on account of delayed lexicalisation of certain items, the contemporary resurgence of obsolete words, as well as the limits of frequency-based productivity diagnostics and the need to take chronological dispersion, register, and discourse domain representation into account. Pierre J.L. Arnaud and Vincent Renner (Université Lumière Lyon 2) shed new light on the growing class of compound verbs from a quantitative perspective, working with a double dataset of over 500 units. They first investigate whether verbal compounding can be considered a direct word-formation pattern and find that, although conversion and desuffixation are proportionally dominant, a sizable minority of the units were most likely coined directly by compounding (e.g. to slant-drill, to spellcheck). In the second part of their research, the authors examine the variety and distribution of internal semantic relations in the dataset of 250 units taken from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). They determine that only a few of the 19 attested relations are numerically significant and that notable correlations between word-formational origin and semantic type emerge (conversion has the strongest affinity with the attribution type, desuffixation with the patient type, and direct compounding with the manner type). Introduction 5 Jesús Fernández-Domínguez (University of Granada) offers both a corpus-frequency study and a semantic classification of new converted verbs such as to wingsuit, to bump fire, and to mailmerge. In a corpusand dictionary-based approach that makes use of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the OED, 81 verbal units - most of them with low or very low frequency - are the object of a thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis. His main conclusion is that denominal verb conversion is morphologically productive but of a very low frequency. Other notable results include the predominance of instrumental and performative verbs and the fact that compound nouns are easily converted into verbs. Vincent Hugou (Sorbonne University) and Mathilde Pinson (Sorbonne Nouvelle University)’s study provides insight into the productivity of the intensifier crazy (as in crazy rich) through the double lens of the COCA and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). In contemporary American English crazy displays a high type frequency which correlates with low semantic coherence: it modifies various semantic classes of adjectives with negative (drunk), positive (good), and neutral (expensive) features. The COHA data depict the diachronic evolution of crazy that accounts for the current productivity of the construction: the initial highfrequency combination with drunk fades away, as does the early-phase preference for negative adjective combination (crazy jealous, crazy mad). The crazy busy construction negotiates the transition of the intensifier to positive contexts. The evolution in distribution accounts for the constructionalisation of crazy from adjective to adverb (grammaticalisation) and from expressing insanity to gradually expressing intensity (desemanticisation). Using the Construction Grammar framework, the study demonstrates that the productivity of crazy + adjective is an ongoing process as corpus data show that crazy may evolve from a maximizer with relative adjectives (crazy jealous) to a booster with absolute adjectives (crazy packed), from an adjectival to a verbal modifier (crazy lost), from an adverb to an affixoid (crazy-fast descending). Finally, the authors provide new insights into the semantic, prosodic, and syntactic conditions under which crazy established itself as an intensifier over mad and changed inheritance from a resultative adjectival construction (crazy drunk, blind drunk) to a schema expressing a high-degree property [ADJ INTENS ] [ADJ x ]. In the fifth and final article of the special issue, Alexandra Bagasheva (Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”) addresses neology in presentday English from a metalinguistic viewpoint, discussing terminological proliferation in the contemporary reference to the linguistic domain of the lexicon. She provides and discusses a list of over 30 terms taken from the literature in terms of neonymy (i.e. new ways to name novel conceptualizations), both from a semantic and word-formational perspective. Ramón Martí Solano / Raluca Nita / Vincent Renner 6 The analysis leads to the conclusion that most of the terms do not correspond to the same units of understanding, reflecting distinct theoretical models of the lexicon with which all linguists working in the field should be familiar. References Anesa, P. (2019). Lexical Innovation in World Englishes: Cross-Fertilization and Evolving Paradigms. London: Routledge. https: / / doi.org/ 10.4324/ 9781351109352 Grieve, J., Nini, A. & Guo, D. (2018). Mapping lexical innovation on American social media. Journal of English Linguistics 46 (4): 293-319. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1177/ 0075424218793 Humbley, J. (2008). Issues of distance and proximity in neologisms, as instanced in e-commerce. ASp 53-54: 25-38. https: / / doi.org/ 10.4000/ asp.325 López Rúa, P. (2021). The subjugation of women through lexical innovation in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Feminismo/ s 38: 23-51. https: / / doi.org/ 10.14198/ fem.2021.38.02 Poix, C. (2018). Neology in children’s literature: a typology of occasionalisms. Lexis 12. https: / / doi.org/ 10.4000/ lexis.2111 Würschinger, Q. (2021). Social networks of lexical innovation: investigating the social dynamics of diffusion of neologisms on Twitter. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 4. https: / / doi.org/ 10.3389/ frai.2021.648583 Zirker, A. & Winter-Froemel, E. (Eds.). (2015). Wordplay and Metalinguistic/ Metadiscursive Reflection: Authors, Contexts, Techniques, and Meta-Reflection. Berlin: De Gruyter. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1515/ 9783110406719