AUTONOMIA I HETERONOMIA EN LA INNOVACIÓ LÈXICA CATALANA

Abstract

In this globalized age it is a challenge for languages to denominate reality from their own perspective and one of the consequences is that languages are pulled towards English, so languages look for their own denominative space while joining the global denomination through linguistic loans. In his “Tendencies actuals en neologia catalana” of 2017, however, J. Freixa offers a new analytical perspective and provides data for Catalan that suggests that many neologisms, apparently trained with the rules of Catalan, are Spanish calques. For this reason, this work analyses a set of 4,200 Catalan lexicographic neologisms documented in the database of the Observatori de Neologia (OBNEO) of 2016 in order to find out which units are properly Catalan and which, on the contrary, are a Spanish loan translation. To avoid distortions of the corpus, we contrast the data with the Factiva corpus, in order to contrast the results obtained. From here, we describe the different degrees of lexical innovation in the Catalan language to see if there is a tendency to loan or to innovate on its own.