Neology in research on the lexicon in English A contentand form-based analysis Alexandra Bagasheva The paper explores the complexities and variations in the neological developments in terminology related to the study of lexemes and the lexicon in English. Neology and terminological variation are essential for knowledge development in scientific communication, with linguistics presenting unique challenges due to its constructed ontological and epistemological reality. The research investigates neoterms in lexicon studies, examining semantic and lexical neoterms, their word-formation patterns, and conceptual complexities, aiming to understand the evolution of terminology in this subdomain. The employed methodology is qualitative-descriptive and synchronic, using wordformation analysis, definitional analysis, and domain conceptual analysis to explore the neoterms in lexicon research. The analyses reveal that most of the neoterms do not lead to the same units of understanding, reflecting different theoretical models and conceptualizations of the lexicon as a characteristic of language and its architecture. The difficulties in achieving a unified ontology of linguistics and the constant need for new terms due to the constructed nature of linguistic categories and the diversity of languages are highlighted. “Neologisms are like casting show winners. A minority of them become established singers, some are one-hit wonders and others almost instantaneously disappear into oblivion.” (Kerremans 2015: 15) 1. Introduction Neology and terminological variation are the modus vivendi of knowledge development in scientific communication. The study of neology in linguistic discourses is an extremely challenging endeavour, first, because linguistics, despite the quantitative turn and solid empirical grounding via the employment of experimental, computational, and various other AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 51 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2026-0006 Alexandra Bagasheva 120 computer-assisted methods of investigation, remains for the most part a constructed ontological and epistemological reality. Second, the multifaceted, emergent complexity of language inevitably invites different approaches to studying separate facets, which leads to entirely different “units of understanding” (Temmerman 2000: 66-69), with the latter redefined as “the categories and intercategorial relationships that exist independent of any culture or language in the domain of interest” (Kerremans, Temmerman & Tummers 2004: 563). These may be linguistically encoded by different specific terms or, unfortunately, by the same term. The multiplicity of different (or same) units of understanding is further determined by immediate research goals, views on the architecture and essence of language and the recognition of different levels of patterning. Third, due to the marked reflexivity of language qua semiotic system, the analyses are cast in the same constructs as the object of investigation. These result in a multiplicity of terms for an already complex and multifaceted object of study. Any unit postulated by a linguist retains the properties of a theoretical construct no matter whether it concerns wellestablished units such as phoneme or debatable ones such as pragmeteme, or entirely novel ones such as flexeme. As Brukette and Kretzschmar (2018: 358 [emphasis mine]) contend, [o]ur perception of “grammar”, along with the categorizations and classifications that the idea of grammar entails, occurs after the fact; in short, our perceptions create observational artifacts, humanmade objects that are the product of our observations. [They] are there simply because we exercised the human tendency to categorize, not because they exist as natural categories. None of the units we operate with in linguistics is a natural category and all function as points of entry into the conceptualizations of emergent epistemo-ontological entities. This suggests that any diversity in the terminology of linguistics is “a cognitive device for supporting a more primary function of the scientific discourse: to create new knowledge” (Pecman 2014: 2), rather than synonymous variation triggered by alternative linguistic construing for the purposes of metalinguistic encoding (and description via terminological definitions) of the same units of understanding. 2. The whats and whys of the current research In view of these two premises, i.e., the constructed nature of categories in linguistics and the exclusively cognitive function that terms in linguistics Neology in research on the lexicon in English 121 discourses perform, the qualitative research offered below may be described as a meta-study, albeit with an explicit focus on neonymy within a specified subdomain - the study of lexemes and the lexicon. Amidst the overlaps and inter-cross-sections between linguistics and metalinguistics, between neology and terminology, between word-formation and semantics, between microand macrostructural terminological research, the investigation of the cohort of neoterms 1 (Costa et al. 2022: 237) populating research on the lexicon and its units offers a review of semantic and lexical neoterms in the subdomain and discusses detectable wordformation patterns and conceptual complexities therein. The objective is twofold: first, to establish directions of development of said research gleaned from the evolution of the semantics of recent terms and second, via reflection on affinities in word-formation families, to trace the most frequent word-formation processes employed and how these associate with a strong motivational factor in the field of neonymy under study. As a corollary, it is expected that a tendency in the conceptual development in the field of studying the lexicon could be traced. Terminological associations based on word-formation similarities, as in cases of various terms constituting a word-formation family (be they part of conscious efforts for revealing the mapping of a studied domain or phenomenon or chance events), may both facilitate and hinder knowledge development within linguistics depending on whether they represent conceptual affinities or not. Ideally, the analysis of neoterms as “linguistic encapsulations of specialized knowledge” (Humbley 2009: 5) is intended to lead to an understanding of the crystallizing “map or a conceptual representation of a knowledge domain’s structure” (Barité & Rauch 2022: 2). This is what the analysis of the dataset of select terms aims to achieve in the field of studying the lexicon. The method adopted is qualitative-descriptive, the approach synchronic, employing word-formation analysis, definitional analysis, and domain conceptual analysis. More specifically the approach is a mixture of the two interrelated, yet differentiated analytical views in terminology research, as defined by Barité and Rauch (2022: 7), a microstructural one (that of punctual terminology), which refers to the study of a term or a restricted set of generally related terms, in questions concerning the etymology, coinage, conceptualization, definition, and identification of synonyms of each term, as well as its grammatical, syntactic and orthographic aspects. 1 The variability in the use of neoterms, neonyms, neologisms, etc. is itself an illustration of the issues at hand and is characterized by the same properties as the units under study. Alexandra Bagasheva 122 The second […], corresponding to systematic research, is macrostructural. It seeks to obtain the mapping of a domain, as generic or specific, as primary or exhaustive as necessary for the research objectives. This […] allows visualizing the links with other domains, facilitating the insertion of a notional system in the preexisting knowledge maps. The data, which are all instances of primary term creation, have been manually culled from a series of dedicated publications (in English) for the period 2019-2024. In linguistics, Humbley’s (2009: 11) claim that “[a] research article is […] by its very function a repository of new terms” resonates strongly, since at least theoretical linguistics is a discursive science (probably excluding certain areas of experimental and computational linguistics). Targeting recency, this five-year span was considered representative of tendencies in the novel developments of lexicon research. Within the socioterminological framework, Kerremans, Temmerman, and Tummers (2004) state that before discussing a domain-specific conceptual model, it is necessary to have an excellent grasp of the categories and their existing interrelationships within the domain of interest, or as defined above units of understanding. This may be an unattainable desideratum in linguistics, since all the units and domains in the study of language are theoretical constructs that are a posteriori analytically imposed. More importantly, in view of the fact that the founding domain is language, where everything holds together sui generis, any local (sub)domain is constitutive of the founding one (language) and contributes to the latter’s (alternative) conceptualization. All models and terms in the specialized field are culture-specific, where culture should be read at least in terms of theoretical persuasion, school of thought, model of language, and analytical methodology. This makes any attempt at analyzing linguistic terms a meta-linguistic endeavor and a kind of epistemological exegesis. Meanwhile, it is very difficult in linguistics to specify the underlying conceptual framework of a founding or fundamental knowledge-domain event as recommended by the cognitive approach to terminology studies (Faber & López Rodríguez 2012: 27). A knowledge-domain event may be conceived of as a prototypical action-environment interface (Barsalou 2003) within which the generic and base-level categories of a domain are configured (Faber & López Rodríguez 2012: 27-29). This is claimed to provide a conceptual template from which the structuring of all levels of information packaging within the specialized domain can be derived (Faber & López Rodríguez 2012: 27-29). In other words, the -icon terms presented below are intended to provide a prototypical domain event or action-environment interface of a delineated subdomain that explicates the Neology in research on the lexicon in English 123 nature of the lexicon and determines the derived properties of all dependent concepts. Linguistic terms, as all other “terms or specialized knowledge units […] can be regarded as access points to more complex knowledge structure[s]” (Faber 2009: 108). Applying the cognitive approach to the linguistic terms under study here leads to establishing the lexicon as the immediate cognitive domain named and partitioned by the respective set of associated terms. The nature, creation, and storage of words are essential properties of the domain, which can only be studied if embedded in the initializing or founding action-environment interface - human language. The latter appears defined under various terms in the relevant literature ranging from a structured system “out there” through an organ or domain-specific capacity to linguisticality (or languaging). It may be claimed that the various conceptualizations of human language can be lumped into three groups with marked internal variations. The first group involves “the notion of language(s) as clearly bounded and stable systems, existing ‘out there’ beyond specific instances of use” (Gurney & Demuro 2022: 1); the second recognizes “language - or rather, languaging - [as] coming into being through performances, practices, and enactments” (Gurney & Demuro 2022: 1 [emphasis mine]) and the third recasts language into “linguisticality” (Haspelmath 2020, [emphasis mine]), defined as “a spontaneously developing set of traits based on and constrained by our cognitive abilities and their underlying biology” (Honing 2018, as quoted in Haspelmath 2020: 2). This only comes to illustrate the difficulty of conceiving a unified ontology of linguistics. The building blocks of languages are not natural kinds, at best they are mental objects and are identified by definitions. Furthermore, as ten Hacken (2015: 3) contends, “[f]or a significant part of specialized vocabulary, imposing a terminological definition is problematic, because it is a fairly arbitrary decision to fix precise boundaries in a continuum”. The categories in theoretical linguistics may be imbued with but naturally lack the “structure of essentialist concepts [which] consists of the representation of an essence, a set of weighed typical features that are shared by category members, and a representation of causal relations between the former and the latter” (Neufeld 2022: 2). Thus, both the identification of conceived categories and the definition of the mental objects with which linguists operate are constructed categories. This frequently creates the need to present together a whole host of neoterms because a novel term in linguistics constructs a novel piece of knowledge in a domain that is at least alternatively conceptualized, if not entirely reconceptualized, and the whole needs to be properly repartitioned, hence the cohort of related neoterms. Besides, no matter how we conceive of language, “languages have a very diverse range of building blocks whose similarities do not appear to be Alexandra Bagasheva 124 rooted in innate natural kinds” (Haspelmath 2020: 1), which further complicates the picture, if we consider including the diversity of languages. The constructed character of linguistic terms is a natural cause for neoterms, beside the constant need to coin neonyms as an act of terminological housecleaning due to the fact that “the terms […] have been used in multiple and confusing senses in the literature” (Haspelmath 2020: 4). It seems to be impossible at least for now to have a unified stock of terms in linguistics, because “[i]t is unfeasible at present to dream that ‘our Mendeleev could just be around the corner, providing syntacticians with a “periodic table of innate syntactic elements’“ (Haspelmath 2020: 6), which by extension applies to all fields within the language sciences. Another pertinent issue is the life cycle and fate of neoterms. Is the fate of neologisms in terminological systems the same as those in general language? Intuitively the answer should be no, since terms are used in specialized discourses and the politics of linguistic research (via funding, publication venues, citations, and the numbers of like-minded adherents) has direct impact on the fate of said discourses and the terminology circulated in them. An additional factor to take into consideration is the nature of the specialized field (studies of the lexicon) within the language sciences. Defining elements within a societal lexicon (a communitycentered view on the vocabulary stock of a language) or the mental lexicon (an individual-centered view on word knowledge, processing, storage, coining, and comprehension) operates with different phenomena and, in the best-case scenario, should lead to the identification of different entities. Beside this immanent division supposedly objectively caused and triggering a plethora of divergent terms, there are further complicating factors concerning theoretical persuasions and the founding models of language described above. For the reason that “the way that elements of knowledge are formulated gives insights into the thought processes involved and into the constraints placed on these processes within the community where they are developed” (Humbley 2009: 5), a number of domain-specific conceptual models of lexicon studies as encoded in the neoterms will be mapped and the question whether these lead to the same units of understanding will be explored. The immediate research question is whether the neoterms (both lexical and semantic) are coterminous and relate to the same units of understanding. The semantic neoterms are studied conceptually, while the lexical ones are studied both conceptually and from the point of view of word-formation. Neology in research on the lexicon in English 125 3. The dataset As a preliminary and theory-neutral definition of the narrow domain of knowledge whose terminological representation is analyzed here, we may use the classical definition provided by Aitchison (2012: 13) - “the human word-store”, or “mental lexicon”. This names just one side of the coin - the individual, mind-enclosed portion of what lexicon as a term in various publications names. The other side - the societal, almost commodified portion - is equated to vocabulary. To quote a turn-of-thecurrent-century researcher “[l]exicon is based on the term lexis […], whose Greek meaning is ‘word’, but which is used as a collective expression in linguistic terminology in the sense of ‘vocabulary’” (Singleton 2000: 1). A much more recent confirmation on the synonymous variation of the terms lexicon and vocabulary comes from Jackson and Amvela (2022: 14): “the terms ‘vocabulary’, ‘lexis’ and ‘lexicon’ are synonymous. They refer to the total stock of words in a language”. It could be argued that there are two separate fields or general domains stranding the different meanings of lexicon (intended as a unified, uniform, and theoryneutral term here): studies of the mental lexicon, pursuing research in Aitchison’s definition of the lexicon and lexicology focused on studying vocabulary, or the lexicon “out there”, “in a language”. As the data reveals, these two meanings remain the poles between which the use of the term lexicon in the relevant literature constantly oscillates, with few clearcut boundaries between the two and a handful of dedicated, specialized terminological differentiations (mentalicon vs. lexicon vs. inventorium; listeme vs. inventoreme vs. mentaleme). The malleability and indeterminacy of terms in the field of lexicon studies seem to reflect the argument that “a rigid delineation of concepts is not compatible with the way concepts are represented in the human mind” (Faber & L’Homme 2022: 9). A word of caution: the conceptualization of the lexemic status and typology of binominal lexemes (Pepper, Masini & Mattiola 2023) and multiword expressions with a semi-lexemic status (Masini 2019) are excluded in the current presentation for lack of space. In Table 1 semantic (marked by the index s) and lexical neoterms (marked by the index l) covering the study of the lexicon are presented, with the limitations described above. Lexical neoterms are actually word-formationally novel and semantically distinct, while semantic neoterms are marked by conceptual modifications/ changes only. The middle column of Table 1 contains verbatim quotations of the definitions of the terms by the authors themselves. The only omissions from the quotations are the original references included in the respective portions of the original texts. The ordering of (neo)terms in Table 1 follows two principles: a conceptual and a formal one. According to the conceptual principle the presentation of the neoterms starts from Alexandra Bagasheva 126 the delineation of the narrow domain or action-environment interface (i.e., different conceptualizations of the lexicon), followed by the identification of the units populating the domain and ending with processes that are postulated to result in the establishment of the said units. The formal principle is based on the quantitative principle of numeric prevalence of one and the same word-formational elements (-icon, -eme, -(iz)ation). Below each term the word-formation process employed for its creation has been indicated in italics. lexicon (n.) entered the English language circa 1600, with the meaning “a dictionary, a word-book”, from French lexicon or directly from Modern Latin lexicon, from Greek lexikon (biblion) “word (book)”, from neuter of lexikos “pertaining to words”, from lexis “a word, a phrase; reason; way of speech, diction, style”, from legein “to say” (from PIE root *leg- (1) “to collect, gather”, with derivatives meaning “to speak (to ‘pick out words’)”). (Etymonline) (Neo)Term Definition Source lexicon s (borrowing) the list of minimal sound-meaning pairs in a language, including single morphemes and multimorphemic forms that have meanings not predictable from their components; a multidimensional space, with words like pig in one corner and phrase structure rules in the opposite corner, and with many sorts of items in between. Construction Grammarians sometimes call this heterogeneous collection the “constructicon”; contains all the words, rules, and constructions of the language; it has to be richly textured in order to capture all the relations among lexical items that are standardly accounted for through morphological rules. We thus find ourselves in a radically new landscape, which from a traditional point of view may feel quite alien Gebhardt (2023: xx) Jackendoff & Audring (2019: 12- 13) Jackendoff & Audring (2019: 24) constructicon l (arguably blending with the splinter -icon or affixation with secreted suffixoid -icon) a multidimensional network of multiple types of associations between constructions (pairings of meaning and form), including taxonomically related patterns and inheritance relations, organized into paradigms, families and neighbourhoods. Diessel (2023: 1-2) Neology in research on the lexicon in English 127 mentalicon l (arguably blending with the splinter -icon or affixation with secreted suffixoid -icon) = mental lexicon (compounding) the set of forms and constructions that they (a language user) have stored in their long-term memory. Haspelmath (2024: 80) mental lexicon s (compounding) a collection of words capturing the knowledge that speakers and hearers have about basic lexical expressions in a language; a reference list of words; a component of natural language grammar; the representation of language in the mind/ brain at the level of individual words and subword meaningful units (morphemes); mental lexicon is seen in most quarters today as far more structured and integrated with the mental grammar; the architecture of the mental lexicon is better understood as resulting from the dynamic integration of multiple levels of information; correlation of these levels, albeit indirect and possibly non-linear, enforces constraints and mutual dependencies that are not justified on single-level grounds. This view is not incompatible with a principle of representational modularity, segregating linguistic information according to levels of representation. Nonetheless, it conceives of lexical knowledge as emerging from the unique, distributed network of stored associations among fragments of disparate representations, including constructions, idioms, proverbs and social routine clichés. Pustejovski & Batiukova (2019: 3) Pustejovski & Batiukova (2019: 3) Papafragou, Trueswell, & Gleitman (2021: 1) Papafragou, Trueswell, & Gleitman (2021: 2) Pirrelli, Plag & Dressler (2021: 3) Alexandra Bagasheva 128 lexemicon l (arguably blending with the splinter -icon or affixation with secreted suffixoid -icon) if we wanted to refer to the set of lexemes in a language, as opposed to its grammatical rules and grammatical markers Haspelmath (2024: 77) flexicon l (arguably blending with the splinter -icon or affixation with secreted suffixoid -icon) the psychocentric, massively interconnected mental lexicon as property of human minds; a highly interconnected and dynamic system of lexical representations, lexical representations seen as hierarchies of action Libben (2022: 10) Libben (2022: 1) inventorium l (borrowing from Medieval Latin, where the lexeme results from deverbal affixation) the inventory of morphs and fixed expressions; the set of forms and constructions that cannot be predicted from other forms or constructions. Haspelmath (2024: 78) Haspelmath (2024: 79) -eme (OED) The termination of many names of significant or distinctive units of structure of some kind in the lexicon, grammar, and phonology of languages, e.g. grapheme, lexeme, morpheme, phoneme, sememe, toneme. lexeme s (questionable affixation) dictionary word = (compounding) lexical item (compounding) = lexeme the collection of wordforms related by inflectional morphology. The lexeme for the verb go includes go, goes, went, going and gone; the set of forms that minimally contain the same lexeme-stem, or one of its suppletive counterparts, and that may only contain inflectional affixes in addition; is the set of word-forms that contain the same noun root, verb root or adjective root and may only contain inflectional affixes in addition; is the term used to refer to the word as an abstract linguistic unit, which represents all the information we associate with a lexical item out of context, i.e., its inherent features; Gebhardt (2023: xix) Haspelmath (2023a: 291) Haspelmath (2024: 77) Pustejovki & Batiukova (2019: 10) Neology in research on the lexicon in English 129 none of the words we actually hear or read are lexemes: they are (physical or acoustic) word forms or grammatical words; We can also talk about lexemes as types and word forms as tokens; Pustejovki & Batiukova (2019: 10) Pustejovki & Batiukova (2019: 10) lexeme-stem l (compounding) a root, or a compound, possibly augmented by derivational affixes, which can combine with inflectional affixes if the language has any but does not contain any inflectional affixes Haspelmath (2023a: 291) listeme (questionable affixation) listeme from Di Sciullo & Williams (1987) is either an inventoreme or a mentaleme Haspelmath (2024: 78- 79) inventoreme l (questionable affixation) inventorial item l (compounding) a form or construction of a language that cannot be predicted from other forms or constructions; the exceptional, idiosyncratic parts of the language that cannot be predicted by rule Haspelmath (2024: 80) Haspelmath (2024: 80) mentaleme l (questionable affixation) mental(ic) item l (affixation and compounding) an element of a language user’s mentalicon Haspelmath (2024: 80) phraseme (questionable affixation) a constrained, or non-free, expression Mel’čuk (2020: 9) lexemic phraseme l (affixation and compounding) the expression is constrained with respect to freely constructed meaning Mel’čuk (2020: 9) semantic-lexemic phraseme l (affixation and compounding) the expression is constrained/ nonconstrained with respect to the meaning constrained by the conceptual representation Mel’čuk (2020: 9) morphemic phraseme l (affixation and compounding) a phraseme (= a constrained combination of linguistic signs) composed of morphemes that are part of the same wordform, which has a segmental structure Mel’čuk (2021: 33) syntactic phraseme l a phraseme that includes at least Alexandra Bagasheva 130 (affixation and compounding) two minimal syntactic subtrees and whose signifier is nonsegmental (it involves prosody or an operation). All syntactic phrasemes are idioms. Mel’čuk (2021: 33) nominemes l (questionable affixation) non-compositional semanticlexemic phrasemes Mel’čuk (2020: 9) pragmetemes l (questionable affixation) the expression is constrained with respect to pragmatic conditions, that is, to the extralinguistic situation of its use Mel’čuk (2020: 9) construction l (arguably blending with the splinter -icon or affixation with secreted suffixoid -icon) inventorial items that include an open slot, i.e., not morphs; at least partially schematic (having one or more open slots), and as parts of languages as historically evolved semiotic systems, not (necessarily) parts of mental knowledge systems; a conventional schema for creating or motivating well-formed expressions in which there is at least one open slot that can be filled by one of several expressions belonging to the same form-class; within a nested network model constructions (as associations) are analyzed as both networks and (emergent) nodes. Haspelmath (2024: 79) Haspelmath (2023b: 1) Haspelmath (2023b: 1) Diessel (2023: 16) lexical superstates l (affixation and compounding) variant forms. [T]ranscendence leads to lexical superstates, which do not have a fixed morphological structure. As part of a lexical superstate, alternative morphological structures exist as potential realizations. Libben (2022: 1) schema l a conceptual template with holistic properties that can combine a particular structure with meaning (as in the case of schematic constructions), but a schema can also represent a purely formal or purely semantic pattern; can be considered a lexical item; all rules are schemas in the lexicon Diessel (2023: 13) Jackendoff & Audring (2019: 16, 39) Neology in research on the lexicon in English 131 morphological transcendence l (affixation and compounding) through the activities of language comprehension and production, lexical forms can develop variant forms Libben (2022: 1) lexicalization s (affixation) basically the process of turning concepts or linguistic features related to an utterance into words Pustejovski & Batiukova (2019: 61) lexemization l (affixation) the diachronic change from an unrestricted combination to a lexeme-stem Haspelmath (2024: 83) inventorization l (affixation) a diachronic change by which an unrestricted combination acquires unpredictable properties so that it must be part of the inventorium (a social and historical, not a cognitive process) Haspelmath (2024: 84) mentalicization l (affixation) a psychological change by which an unrestricted combination comes to be part of a speaker’s mentalicon (or “mental lexicon”) Haspelmath (2024: 87) lexification l = lexicalization (affixation) the way in which lexical forms are mapped onto semantic elements Haspelmath (2024: 82) antileximization l (affixation) is very rare, as we almost never find cases such as (19), where the root alcoholic is broken up into the parts alcand -oholic, and new words are formed with the element -oholic Haspelmath (2024: 88) constructionalization l (affixation) the emergence of an entirely new schema (or new node) in the constructicon Diessel (2023: 18) Table 1. Semantic and lexical primary neoterms in the study of the lexicon Two of the edited sources on the study of the lexicon included in Table 1, Papafragou, Trueswell, and Gleitman 2021 and Pirrelli, Plag, and Dressler 2021, are not included in the discussion, since both pertain to the representational view which straddles the individual-societal divide, i.e., they are devoted to the study of internal mental representation (the mental lexicon) of words “out there”. Neither provides an explicit definition of lexeme as such. In both, the texts are couched in the distinctions drawn between grammar and the lexicon and between the lexicon of a language and the mental lexicon (Papafragou, Trueswell & Gleitman 2021: 2). In both, the term word is used as more of an operational, practical term to Alexandra Bagasheva 132 name what people operate with (interactionally in usage events and in context and mentally as storage, processing, comprehension). It surfaces that for computational, neurolinguistic, and psycholinguistic research on the lexicon, word is a far more viable unit of analysis, with a better suited granularity level of generality (despite the chaos in the relevant literature on the word as stated by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002: 2-13)). This can be explained with the research agendas pursued and by the recognition that “[…] words are the ultimate interfacers between the main components of the grammar, knowledge about a word includes knowledge about its syntactic, semantic, and phonological possibilities. This makes words the ultimate symbolic sign, the chief domain for the mapping of meaning to form” (Hippisley 2015: 246). 4. Discussion 4.1 Semantic analysis (based on conceptual-definitional distinctions) Word is used in the discussion offered here as a meta term (theory-neutral and having no specific value) to name anything that falls within the scope of studying the lexicon, be it a single item or a multi-item expression with a single meaning (e.g., the various types of phrasemes), etc. It is used to neutralize any of the implied variations of a single term or varying terms intended to discuss ways of being of words in various domains of studies. For the sake of brevity, only the terms ending with -icon and -eme are analyzed conceptually. Conceptual analysis of the terms ending in - (iz)ation goes beyond the scope of the current research, even though this violates exhaustiveness. As it does not affect the drawn conceptual differentiations or qualitatively changes the claims that are made, this decision sounds reasonable. Before analyzing the neoterms and hypothesizing which ones are instances of term variation and which ones are neoterms for novel conceptualizations, offering a novel construct, it should be noted that in some of its uses, lexicon presupposes at least a bipartite architecture of language (Gerhardt 2023; Pustejovski & Batiukova 2019) - lexicon as opposed to grammar (rules). Constructicon does not conceptually presuppose a notable partitioning of the whole as the network conceptualization imposes a unified view of the architecture of language, definitionally representing language as a qualitatively identical whole, where hierarchicity arises out of the complexity of the same type of entity (construction), not of different kinds of entities (morpheme, lexeme, phrase, etc.). At the same time, as a term, it pertains to both what is “out there”, i.e., the societal lexicon, and Neology in research on the lexicon in English 133 to the mental processing (and storage) of packages of knowledge maintained by individuals, i.e., lexicon 2 and lexicon 3 , as explicated below. Definitionally (and conceptually, since for the purposes of the discussion a definition is taken to be the unpacking of a concept) the first inevitable observation is that the lexicon names three different domains: one metalinguistic, lexicon 1 , i.e., a theoretical construct in explaining/ modelling the architecture of human language (as in Pustejovski & Batiukova 2019; Gebhardt 2023; Haspelmath 2024); lexicon 2 as the reified inventory of language expressions “out there in the world”, recorded in dictionaries and discussed by lay people (as in Pustejovski and Batiukova 2019; Haspelmath 2024); and lexicon 3 as a supposed interface between language and the mind, i.e., the mental lexicon (as in Pustejovski & Batiukova 2019; Haspelmath 2024; Libben 2022). The neoterms do not lead to the same units of understanding. Besides delineating the three different domains outlined above, they project different models of the lexicon as a property of language and its architecture, depending on the theoretical approach and the overall conceptualization of what language is. Flexicon is not the same as mentalicon, as the former has a dynamic view of language as an activity, while the latter has a static view of language as a memory structuring and memory-deposited list. In other words, conceptually, mentalicon, flexicon and lexicon 3 supposedly name the same domain and might be said to be alternatives naming the same unit of understanding. However, the properties of the domains are different and, ultimately, they name different concepts. They are populated by words and word remains a pluralistically defined concept. As Gaspari (2021: 592) claims, the understanding of words can be grouped into two basic streams: “words are bundles of structural-functional features defining a unique performance profile (bundalism) OR words are noneternal continuants individuated by their causal-historical ancestry (lineageism)”. He recognizes the plurality of conceptions of wordhood and contends that we should embrace this plurality as no single conception can exhaustively inform us of the essence of wordhood. Evidently, the pluralism of terms reflects pluralistic conceptualizations of a pluralistic mental object reflecting a pluralistic entity. The terms lexicon, constructicon, mental lexicon, mentalicon, lexemicon, and inventorium do not name the same unit of understanding and are not conceptual equivalents. Their linear ordering above reflects the narrowing inclusiveness of their respective denotative scope. Admittedly, one stands out even word-formationally and is the narrowest in scope, naming a well-identified set of elements “out there” - “the set of unpredictable elements of a language” (Haspelmath 2024: 79). Implicit even in this narrow portion of what is comprehensively dubbed the lexicon is the opposition between words and grammar. The term mental lexicon as an Alexandra Bagasheva 134 endocentric compound specifying a subtype of the blanket category explicitly draws the distinction between words “out there” (vocabulary/ societal lexicon) and words in the individual human mind and coincides with lexicon 3 . Constructicon is not an alternative terminological variant to any of them but as a lexical neoterm it imposes a specific theoretical view on both the fundamental generic domain (language) and the specific domain (words out there, lexemes and what they are organized into/ contained in the mind), as in Diessel (2023). Constructicon names a conceptualization of language as a unified whole, where quantitative differentiations in terms of abstraction can account for different patternings, but no qualitative differentiations among linguistic objects can be established. The constituents thereof are construction and schema. The former is identified as associations embodied both in networks and in emergent nodes (Diessel 2023), but only within the constructicon as a nested network model. As becomes obvious from Table 1 the term construction is characterized by semantic splitting, or we are dealing with two different terms, since when the constructicon is not recognized as the whole, but construction is conceptualized as a direct meronym of language, constructions are defined differently - as inventorial items that include an open slot, i.e., not morphs; or as at least partially schematic (having one or more open slots), and as parts of languages seen as historically evolved semiotic systems, not (necessarily) parts of mental knowledge systems (Haspelmath 2023, 2024). Inventorium belongs to a set of terms partitioning the lexicon into four distinct, complementary subdomains, each containing elements with specific bundles of features: • lexicon as the component of grammar that creates word-forms; • lexicon as the component of grammar that stores and creates lexemes; • lexicon as the INVENTORIUM, i.e., the set of unpredictable elements of a language; • lexicon as the MENTALICON, i.e., the set of memorized elements (the “mental lexicon”) (Haspelmath 2024: 72) The first is populated by word-forms/ words, the second by lexemes, the third by inventoremes, and the last by mentalemes. All are defined as bounded regions capturing linguistic objects “out there”. Only the fourth one is substantively different and pertains to the mental lexicon, but as a semantic neoterm, since it only picks the set of memorized elements from lexicon 3 . Flexicon is also conceptually distinct and not a variant term. It conceptualizes an entirely different and novel reality of lexicon 3 . The conceptual- Neology in research on the lexicon in English 135 ization of the lexicon as a flexicon, i.e., as a resonating, dynamic network of interrelated actions, collapses the out there and the inside notion as the act occurs simultaneously in the mind and in the communicative interaction. As neoterms go, linguisticality relates to language as the flexicon relates to lexicon. The characteristic common features in the conceptualization of human languaging emerging from these two terms is that they ultimately define the knowledge domain of linguistics as a continuum of epiphenomenally delineated dynamic intraand inter-active acts. The principles governing these in the flexicon are lexical superstates and morphological transcendence, both naming not constituent units (i.e., not formulating meronymic, constituency relations) but underlying organizing principles of operation. The -eme terms are also predominantly lexical neoterms (inventoreme, pragmeteme, mentaleme, nomineme) but phraseme and lexeme are characterized by semantic neology. There is a much clearer tendency for -eme neoterms to constitute hyponymic chains, i.e., be arranged in terms of subtypes. This is reflected in the word-formation patterns adopted - compounding as in the series of phrasemes and lexeme-stem, to the exclusion of nomineme, which names a subtype of phraseme but stands apart from the series word-formationally, probably because it is not formally but semantically distinct from other phrasemes. Lexeme is characterized by semantic neotermy in that once its definition reads “word as an abstract linguistic unit” or a type and once as a set of items or a collection of wordforms defined either minimally in terms of their constituency or relationally in terms of what elements (inflections) can be attached to them. Listeme captures lexicon 2 and lexicon 3 or at least does not differentiate between two entities making up a different whole, which raises questions as to the unique nature of the two respective wholes (the inventorium and the mentalicon). Nonetheless, it displays either polysemy or semantic neotermy since it is differentiated in one of its definitions from the classical definition by Di Sciullo and Williams (1987). The phraseme series captures a conceptualization of both mental entities and expressions “out there” characterized by non-free expressions. The hyponymic set is differentiated on the basis of the level of patterning at which constraints determine the non-freedom (e.g. lexemic, morphemic, syntactic, etc.) of the linguistic expression. As these are defined without any specification of the subdomain containing them, there is the possibility for assigning them to the individual mental lexicon as well. Pragmeteme stands apart as being specifically constrained by situation of use, which might invite a dynamic analysis, but in reality simply defines the constraints that restrict the set expression as arising from reallife parameters of use. Alexandra Bagasheva 136 As an interim summary, from a terminological perspective, the neoterms are motivated by novel conceptualizations within the local domain engendered by different theoretical models of the basic actionenvironment interface and represent different “epistemic communities”. It transpires that within the field of studying the lexicon within linguistics there are various epistemic communities, where the latter is understood as “networks of knowledge-based experts that hold in common a set of principled and causal beliefs, have shared notions of validity, exchange knowledge, and shape, demarcate, and articulate the identities of present and future knowledge producers” (Hjørland 2017: endnote 20). The epistemic communities’ delineations may be summarized into: (i) one unified by a dominant component view, where grammar is the component of language against which the properties of the lexicon are emancipated; (ii) one with lexicon understood as a property of an individual’s mind (the mental lexicon, the lexemicon, inventorium and mentalicon); (iii) a uniform architectural view of language dubbed the constructicon, where schemas and constructions are the only units, with construction straddling the opposition individual vs. societal and schema via abstraction procedures straddling the entity (linguistic unit) vs. rule divide; and (iv) a dynamic psychocentric view highlighting the dynamic, engaged activity of languaging in the mind (or linguisticality) - the flexicon. 4.2 Word-formational analysis 2 The utility of word-formation analysis in terminology research is predicated on the premise that “part of the content of the concept may be displayed in the term” (Fernández-Silva, Freixa & Cabré 2009: 21). One such manifestation is through the word-formation constituents, which are considered part of the motivational forces for term creation. We may speculate that just as a linguistic unit (target) is considered motivated if some of its properties are shaped by a linguistic source (form and/ or content) and language-independent factors (Radden & Panther 2004: 3), so are the investigated neoterms motivated morphosemantically (languageinternal factors) and conceptually, i.e., theoretically (language-external factors). In Myking’s (2009: 47) reasoning, “[t]he purpose of motivation in neonymy may be described in the following way: motivation should make the neonym easily understandable and meaningful within the context in which it is intended to function, by means of interaction and interplay of linguistic and extra-linguistic mechanisms”. 2 For the purposes of the analysis, the traditional (semasiologically established) typology of word-formation processes as developed in Plag (2018) and in Bauer, Lieber, and Plag (2013) has been used. Neology in research on the lexicon in English 137 Adding to the general theory of motivation of linguistic signs Myking’s (2009) model of motivation in term formation, as illustrated in Figure 1, we can postulate that the neoterms under analysis result from indirect, sign-internal conceptual and morphological, partial structural motivation (which can be traced from top to bottom in Figure 1). MOTIVATION Indirect (system-internal) Conceptual motivation Morphological Semantic complete ^ partial regular irregular (morpho-semantic) (structural) derivation composition phrasal formation confixation Figure 1. A simplified taxonomy of motivations, modeled after Myking (2009: 48) 3 The extracted neoterms are distributed into nests in the following series - -icon, -eme, -ization. The series represents the following conceptual relations: -icon names the local domain or the narrow action-environment interface, -eme names the constituents thereof, individuated elements with independent status within the local domain, and -ization names the process or result of individuation, i.e., the establishment of entities with specific properties. The -eme units seem to be in meronymic relations with the whole. They are its constitutive parts. Among themselves -eme units are either in co-hyponymic or hyponymic relations. The two types 3 Cf. Myking (2009: 44). The double arrow indicates an instance of possible overlap (Myking 2009: 48). Alexandra Bagasheva 138 of relations seem to be consistently morphologically distinguishable - cohyponyms (lexeme, nomineme, pragmeteme, phraseme, etc., which are characterized by a sufficient number of distinct properties to be assigned the status of distinct meronyms of the whole) are differentiated by the first constituent in the -eme neoterm, while hyponyms are consistently created via endocentric compounding (Mel’čuk’s (2020, 2021) types of phrasemes). The neoterms (to the exception of schema, inventorium, and construction) belong to three families: -icon-based, -eme-based, and -ization-based units. It could be argued whether these are compound or affixal families. It seems that the most highly populated of these and diachronically the earliest one is the -eme pattern, whose “sudden burgeoning” was registered in 1953 by Entwistle, in his Aspects of Language (iii. 79). This gives us grounds to claim that the -eme neoterms are doubly motivated. The meaning motivation can be read from Crystal’s succinct definition (2008: 167), which is worth quoting in full [emphasis as in the original]: An ‘emic’ approach, by contrast, takes full account of FUNCTIONAL relationships, setting up a closed system of abstract CONTRASTIVE UNITS as the basis of a DESCRIPTION. Emic is in fact derived from such terms as PHONEME and MORPHEME, where -eme refers to the minimal DISTINCTIVE UNITS involved. Evidently the individuation of entities populating a local domain is based on the differentiation of minimal functionally contrasting elements. This conceptual motivation is clear in all -eme neoterms discussed. From the point of view of linguistic analysis, we may claim that they are motivated, consciously, analogically created neoterms (mentaleme, inventoreme, phraseme). A notable lexical gap here is flexeme. In view of the fact that Roldán-Vendrell and Fernández-Domínguez (2012) recognize lexical gaps in specialized languages as generators of neoterms, flexeme makes a conspicuous absence. The explication for this absence may be twofold. On the one hand the phenomenon of hypostatization (Schmid 2008: 5) of lexical items, which equally affects everyday words and terms, through which some kind of fixedness and unit-individuation is achieved, will lead to flexeme countering the very idea the concept of the flexicon promotes - dynamic acts. On the other hand, the term flexeme appears to be in circulation in the linguistics literature, but with an entirely different conceptual content in a knowledge base related to fixed forms in paradigms. More specifically, flexemes are “lexical units characterized in terms of form, as opposed to lexemes, characterized in terms of meaning - to model overabundance - i.e., the availability of more than one form in the same paradigm cell” (Pellegrini 2023: 361). The concept of flexeme as individuated by its inflectional paradigm (Bonami & Crys- Neology in research on the lexicon in English 139 mann 2018: 175), where flex is associated with inflection via truncation and a complex analogical associative chain, might have been a contributing factor for the non-appearance of flexeme as a unit of the flexicon. It might be far-fetched to recognize here terminological blocking, but we may tentatively suggest that the existence of the term with a diametrically opposed conceptual content may have exerted some influence on the lexical gap. While both -ation/ ization and -eme are recognized in the OED, neither -icon, nor -con are registered. No information is available on -icon and -con in Etymonline either. While -ation is clearly a suffix, -eme is of an ambiguous status. It is identified as a termination in the OED, so its status as a word-formation constituent is open to debate. The same applies to -icon, whose secretion we are witnessing and can cautiously identify as a suffixoid (staying neutral as to the compounding/ blending/ affixation controversy). The development of the suffixoid may have been influenced by the meaning of the word icon and thus may represent an instance of blending, not suffixation. Libben himself (2022: 8) claims that “flexicon will be processed as the alternatives [flex][icon] and [f][lexicon], resulting in the activation of both the words flex and lexicon”. Besides, he contends that “language users split a word in two when either a left or right substring corresponds to an existing word in the individual’s lexicon” (Libben 2022: 8). In that sense, the -icon neoterms are motivated both conceptually (a pressing need for clarification of concepts and fixation of domains) and word-formationally. Ideally, conceptual and structural motivation should go hand in hand and lead to uniform results, where structural similarities should associate with conceptual affinities and be reflected in the revealing semantic relations among neoterms. As the analyses offered hopefully illustrate, the reality is not that streamlined. 5. Conclusion If we follow the 4-stage model of studying term formation (Humbley 2009), the analysis offered here was able to cover only the observation stage and partially the description stage in the study of the following neoterms: flexicon, mentalicon, lexemicon, inventorium, inventoreme, mentaleme, antileximization, leximization, inventorization, pragmeteme, lexemic, morphemic and syntactic phraseme, construction, constructicon, schema. These neoterms do not represent instances of term variation, they result from new conceptualizations. For the most part they are lexical, not semantic neoterms. Lexicon surfaces as a contested term, as much as word and lexeme, generating semantic neologisms. Alexandra Bagasheva 140 As Emmeche, Budtz Pedersen, and Stjernfelt (2016: xiii) claim, [W]e are aware that the humanities very rarely make themselves an object of study. In contrast to the social sciences, where there is a longstanding tradition for not only examining the field’s own research practices but also for studying research cultures in the natural sciences, there has never been a ‘humanities studies’. This understanding has led to the adage that “the humanities are overdebated, but under-investigated” (Hjørland 2017: endnote 20). In view of this, leaving aside the debate whether linguistics is part of the humanities, the discussion offered above was a small step (inspired by Haspelmath’s various attempts at terminological housecleaning within linguistics) in this direction - an explicit reflexive investigation into the field studying lexemes and the lexicon. In the case of lexicon studies, morphological motivation (the wordformation families) maintain continuity and point to affinities, while conceptual-semantic motivation leads to the neo-parts in order to introduce intricate and delicate conceptual differentiations aimed at ultimately changing the conceptualization of the whole domain, i.e., to introduce a novel essence into the understanding of what lexicon actually is. The general tendency that emerges is one towards a dynamic conceptualization of a fluid domain with emergent properties. The neoterms are all directed towards incorporating in one way or another first, the excessive complexity of language, second, the hypothesis that words are the unique interfacers thereof, and third, the understanding that language is really languaging or linguisticality. Only scientific legitimization within the body politic of linguistics will show what the fate of these neoterms will be. 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