| Abstract [eng] |
Language is a means through which people express how they perceive their surroundings. When it comes to encountering and categorizing unfamiliar phenomena, creative capacity is at hand, which is evident from an everflowing stream of newly coined words related to Covid-19 pandemic, or so-called coroneologisms. Therefore the question of this research is aimed at linguistic creativity – what can the surface structure of such emerging neologisms tell us about creative cognitive processes and in what ways the two are linked? As creativity has to do with cognition (Lee 2001: 200), and „blending is central to human thought and imagination“ (Evans, Green 2006: 401), the method adopted in this research is mainly based on Conceptual Blending Theory, developed by Mark Turner and Charles Fauconnier (Fauconnier, Turner 2002). The data of the research consists of 35 coroneologisms that are either compounds, e.g. kauknešys (kaukė ‘mask’ + nešti ‘carry’) ‘face mask smuggler’, or lexical blends, e.g. pandemima (pandemija ‘pandemic’ + pantomima ‘pantomime’) ‘efforts to communicate while wearing a face-mask’ and have an underlying metaphor in their meaning, following the notion of creative compounding referred in Benczes (2010). The data has been collected primarily from The Database of Lithuanian Neologisms, social media and other online sources. Derivational and syntactic-semantic analyses were carried out to reveal the components of the neologisms. Then, using such surface and underlying structures as reference, a conceptual meaning analysis was carried out applying the conceptual blending method. The results reveal that in creating new words, analogy plays a significant role both on the lexical and conceptual levels. Also, there are multiple ways that metaphor, underlying the surface structure, takes place in conceptual integration. Along with the immediate context, these ways are influenced by the communicative purpose and cultural background of the speaker. And while metaphor was a given, irony, emerging from compressing disanalogy, was found to be characteristic of creative compounds and blends such as coroneologisms. |
