New lexis in the native language - a workshop

Call for papers

Date:   Friday 3rd May 2013

Place:   Centre for Research in Linguistics and the Language Sciences (CRiLLS), Newcastle University

Keynote speaker: Laurie Bauer

Although the topic of new words is often associated with second language learning, lexical innovation in the first language has over the years also attracted a good amount of both lay and linguistic interest. It is not hard to find discussion of new words in the press and there are masses of popular material for this on the internet. In linguistic studies, there is a long tradition of investigating new lexis from a historical point of view. There is also a great deal of material on word formation as an aspect of morphology and more recently there has been discussion of methods of measuring the productivity of such processes. Currently, an increasing amount of work is also being done on the psycholinguistic processes involved in learning new words in one's native language.

For this workshop, we invite contributions on the topic of new lexis in the native language. They could address issues within (or outwith) the following areas:

• •·         properties of individual word-formation processes;
• •·         the measurement of their productivity;
• •·         the exploration of corpora to trace new word patterns;
• •·         factors influencing the diffusion of new words;
• •·         the empirical study of new-word learning;
• •·         the representation of new words in dictionaries;
• •·         theoretical issues involved in any of the above.

Abstracts (max. 1 page) are invited for presentations of 30 minutes (20 minutes speaking, 10 minutes questions). Send to: w.a.m.van-der-wurff@ncl.ac.uk. The deadline is 20 March 2013.

A second circular, with the full programme and further details, will be sent round at the end of March.