Lexical Creativity in Online Music Reviews: A Corpus Study of Hyphenated Neologistic Compounds
Lexical Creativity in Online Music Reviews: A Corpus Study of Hyphenated Neologistic Compounds

Summary/Abstract: The language of the 21st century encompasses a wide array of texts, many of which can be foundon the Internet. While the language of Internet blogs, posts and memes has receivedconsiderable attention from scholars, the language of online music reviews remains one of themost underresearched Internet genres. One of the music reviewing websites offering lexicallycreative content is Pitchfork. Authors of the reviews are prolific with regard to the creation ofhyphenated neologistic compounds such as all-proceeds-to-charity wine, the last-real-gangsta-standing attitude and smartphone-sucking lives. The aim of this study is to analyse hyphenatedcompound occasionalisms and neologisms in Pitchfork music reviews in terms of their meaning,structure and function. The analysis features compounds obtained from the corpus of musicreviews created for the purpose of the study. Quantitative analysis involves all compounds inthe reviews, while qualitative analysis is employed for neologistic compounds. The findingsindicate that two-element compounds are the most common in the corpus as far as compoundstructure is concerned. In terms of the syntactic criterion, compound adjectives are the mostfrequently used, followed by compound nouns, with few instances of compound verbs andadverbs. Neologistic compounds are employed for the purposes of ludic wordplay as well asachieving humour and irony. The most salient features of neologistic compounds are highcontext-dependence, unpredictability and allusions to pop-culture.

• Details
• Contents