Lecture Stylistics as a science. Problems of stylistic research. Plan

e) Literary Coinages (Including Nonce-Words)
The ambiguous term neologism.
The coining of new words generally arises first of all with the need to designate new concepts resulting from the development of science and also with the need to express nuances of meaning called forth by a deeper understanding of the nature of the phenomenon in question. It may also be the result of a search for a more economical, brief and compact form of utterance which proves to be a more expressive means of commu­nicating the idea.
The first type of newly coined words (designate newborn concepts) - terminological coinages. The second type (words, coined because their creators seek expressive utte­rance) - stylistic coinages.
New words are mainly coined according to the productive models for word-building in the given language. But the new words of the literary-bookish type we are dealing with in this chapter may sometimes be built with the help of affixes and by other means which have gone out of use or which are in the process of dying out.
Among new coinages of a literary-bookish type must be mentioned a considerable layer of words appearing in the publicistic style, mainly in newspaper articles and magazines and also in the newspaper style— mostly in newspaper headlines: blimp — a name coined by Low, the well-known English cartoonist. The name was coined to designate an English colonel famous for his conceit, brutality, ultra-conservatism. This word gave birth to a derivative, viz. Blimpish. Other examples are ‘backlash’ (отвечать ударом за удар, политика «белого бумеранга», неожиданное сильное движение назад, вызывать отрицательную реакцию) (in ‘backlash policy’) and its opposite ‘front lash’.
Throughout the history of the English literary language, scholars have expressed their opposition to three main lines of innovation in the vocabulary: firstly, to borrowings which they considered objection­able because of their irregularity; secondly, to the revival of archaic words; and thirdly, because the process of creation of new words was too rapid for the literary language to assimilate.
The fate of literary coinages mainly de­pends on the number of rival synonyms already existing in the vocab­ulary of the language. It also depends on the shade of meaning the new coinage may convey to the mind of the reader.
Many coinages disappear entirely from the language, leaving no mark of their even brief existence. Other literary neologisms leave traces in the vocabulary because they are fixed in the literature of their time. In other words, new literary-bookish coinages will always leave traces in the language, inasmuch as they appear in writing. This is not the case with colloquial coinages. These, as we shall see later, are spontaneous, and due to their linguistic nature, cannot be fixed unless special care is taken by specialists to preserve them.
Most of the literary-bookish coinages are built by means of affix­ation and word compounding.
Semantic word-building, that is, giving an old word a new meaning, is rarely employed by writers who coin new words for journalistic pur­poses. It is too slow and imperceptible in its growth to produce any kind of sensational effect.