FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

“Crockadowndillies”: I guess, they are remarkable animals potentially resembling crocodiles and likely to be more active at the crack of dawn. It seems that they share the same habitat as hippodumplings which cannot possibly be the large hippos we know if they squiggle like worms. This is an English occasionalism coined by Roald Dahl in The BFG: ‘They would be putting me in a zoo or the bunkumhouse with all those squiggling hippodumplings and crockadowndillies.’ The occasionalism can be considered either as a case of complex morphosemantic neology (blending + affixation) potentially linked with semantic neology (metaphor) or simply analysed as morphological neology (lengthening and distortion of a lexeme). Crockadowndillies are translated into German as “Krokodilleriche”, in Italian as “cocodrindillo”, and in French they are either “alligrasporcs” or “croque-l’Odile” – though from the same translator in the same edition.

My research focuses on lexical neology and more particularly on the contrastive study (language creativity and its translation) of occasionalisms in children’s literature. To this end, I have compiled a corpus of 19th and 20th century classic children’s books written and translated in French, English, German and Italian. The aligned corpus includes more than 9.2 million words.
https://cerla.univ-lyon2.fr/equipe/chercheur-es-titulaires/poix-cecile