Retronyms and neonyms : A corpus-based study
Mäkelä, Eetu (2022)
2022
Kielten maisteriohjelma - Master's Programme in Languages
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2022-11-07
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202210187680
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202210187680
Tiivistelmä
This thesis examines the use of select retronyms and neonyms in English over the timespan of ten years in 2010–2019. Retronyms are words created to distinguish an older version of a concept from a newer version (e.g. paper book), and their neonym counterparts are words that specify the new version (e.g. e-book). The research is focused on two questions: how the frequency of the words in language changes, and what their collocational patterns can tell us about the contexts they occur in.
The theoretical framework of the thesis consists of four main areas: lexical semantics, word-formation, retronyms, and corpus linguistics. The area of lexical semantics focuses particularly on semantic change, semantic relations, and prototype theory. The data of the thesis was collected from the News on the Web (NOW) Corpus using the search function. First, the changes in frequency were observed using the CHART display which lists the frequency of the terms in each year. Second, the collocational patterns were queried using the COLLOCATES display which gives a list of words that commonly occur near the retronyms and neonyms. The results were analyzed and presented in figures and tables.
The analysis shows that different retronym-neonym pairs have undergone different developments in frequency during the timeframe, with some showing a decline, others in the stage of increasing, and some stabilized. For most of the pairs, the retronyms were less frequently used than the neonyms. The collocational patterns show that the neonym and retronym terms are often used when the two concepts are compared. In the discussion, the application of prototype theory is suggested to explain why some retronyms remain infrequent. As this thesis only observes a set of five retronym-neonym pairs, there is need and potential for further research.
The theoretical framework of the thesis consists of four main areas: lexical semantics, word-formation, retronyms, and corpus linguistics. The area of lexical semantics focuses particularly on semantic change, semantic relations, and prototype theory. The data of the thesis was collected from the News on the Web (NOW) Corpus using the search function. First, the changes in frequency were observed using the CHART display which lists the frequency of the terms in each year. Second, the collocational patterns were queried using the COLLOCATES display which gives a list of words that commonly occur near the retronyms and neonyms. The results were analyzed and presented in figures and tables.
The analysis shows that different retronym-neonym pairs have undergone different developments in frequency during the timeframe, with some showing a decline, others in the stage of increasing, and some stabilized. For most of the pairs, the retronyms were less frequently used than the neonyms. The collocational patterns show that the neonym and retronym terms are often used when the two concepts are compared. In the discussion, the application of prototype theory is suggested to explain why some retronyms remain infrequent. As this thesis only observes a set of five retronym-neonym pairs, there is need and potential for further research.