Coining Nonce Words: Contrastive Research Based On A Novel

Abstract

Nonce words or occasionalisms are coined for a particular occasion and usually they are used just once. It is especially difficult when such newly created words have to be translated to another language. This article studies John Harding’s novel Florence & Giles and its Bulgarian translation (by Vladimir Molev). It is a sinister Gothic story told by the 12-year-old Florence living in an isolated New England mansion in 1891. She distorts words by transforming them into other parts of speech, e.g. nouns and adjectives are turned into verbs, nouns into adjectives, adverbs and prepositions into verbs, etc. At first, it could be annoying to the reader, however, once you get used to her narration, it is both fanciful and charming. This research studies the intensely concentrated nonce words in the text and their equivalents in Bulgarian from the point of view of their grammatical, word-formative and semantic characteristics. The contrastive method when applied to the parallel corpus shows some similarities and a lot of differences in the particular characteristics of nonce words due to the specifics of the two languages under discussion.