Linguistic creativity of occasionalisms in Brandon Sanderson’s works

Abstract

This paper investigates the linguistic creativity of authoral occasionalisms of American fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson on the material of his series of works “The Stormlight Archive”. The captivating phenomenon of occasionalisms is examined in the terms of linguistic creativity and measured according to the criteria we have derived. The study focuses on word formation, a linguistic tool that is the creative act of inventing new words. The art of word creation has long been a hallmark of human linguistic ingenuity, allowing us to create new concepts and give them appropriate denotations and connotations. As part of our study, we observe the way Brandon Sanderson, as a linguistic personality, gives semantics to the concepts and terms he has created, and “surrounds” them with pragmatics in the context of sentences and the overall narrative text. We hope to shed light on the understudied synergy between author and language/author and speech, thereby contributing to our understanding of how writers devote to the linguistic innovation, and shape the future of language itself. This research has implications not only for linguistics, but also for the development of understanding the potential of fiction to enrich speech, creative writing, and the evolution of language in our dynamic age.