FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

My favorite neologism has to be the verb ‘pimpen’, introduced in Dutch in 2006. ‘Pimpen’ is an excellent example of contact-induced lexical innovation, originating from the MTV show ‘Pimp my ride’, which first aired in the Low Countries in 2005. Various colleagues and I together studied the trajectory from ‘Pimp my ride’ over ‘pimp – possessive pronoun – noun phrase’ to ‘pimpen’ in Dutch.

• Pijpops, D., De Pascale, S., Van de Velde, F., Zenner, E. (2023). Big Pimpin’. Een big data-benadering van de verspreiding van het leenwoord pimpen in het Nederlands. Taal en Tongval: Language Variation in the Low Countries, 75 (1), 73-113. https://doi.org/10.5117/TET2023.1.005.PIJP
• De Pascale, S., Pijpops, D., Van de Velde, F., Zenner, E. (2022). Reassembling the pimped ride: A quantitative look at the integration of a borrowed expression. Frontiers in Communication, 7, Art.No. 777312, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.777312
• Van de Velde, F., Zenner, E. (2010). Pimp my Lexis: het nut van corpusonderzoek in normatief taaladvies. In: E. Hendrickx, K. Hendrickx, W. Martin, H. Smessaert, W. Van Belle, J. Van der Horst (Eds.), Liever meer of juist minder? Over normen en variatie in taal, (51-68). Gent: Academia press. ISBN: 978-90-382-1646-1.

Eline Zenner is associate professor at the Brussels campus of KU Leuven, where she conducts research on language contact with a special focus on the influence of English on Dutch in Flanders. Her main goal is to better understand the process of borrowing and contact-induced (lexical) innovation. To this end, she combines different methods and perspectives, and dissects language production (how do we use language), language perception (what do we expect about language) and language attitudes (how do we evaluate language) in different contexts of use. In recent years, Eline has been paying increasing attention to how young language users acquire the (social) meaning of contact-based language variation. Through various collaborations with (international) colleagues, she studies, for example, how (pre)adolescents learn to relate to English terms and language alternatives.

https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/english/our-staff/zap/elinezenner