Considerations Regarding the Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Dimension of Occasionalisms

Abstract

Vocabulary changes are an inherent part of the process of existence and development of a language system. In order to give a name to the phenomena of the surrounding reality, the human, as a creative being, not only makes use of the existing possibilities of the language system, but also resorts to possible means of creating words that are not yet used, or not used at all, and is sometimes put in the position of breaking the established lexical rules. Nonce words, being definite attributes of the speech, display a paradigmatic-syntagmatic combinatory capacity similar to that of common words, thus filling the gaps in the language system. Being, on the one hand, a means of naming through the process of its selection from the multitude of possible lexical variants, the nonce word falls within the realm of paradigmatics, and, on the other hand, being part of a context and interacting with the linguistic signs in its proximity, the nonce word also enters into relations of a syntagmatic order. The present paper proposes a paradigmatic and syntagmatic investigation, thus highlighting the various paradigmatic (hyponymy/hyperonymy, polysemy, homonymy, paronymy, synonymy and antonymy) and syntagmatic (logical-lexical, associative and syntactic relations) relationships in which nonce words can be embedded.