FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

“Smombie”, in French (but also an internationalism), denotes “A walking person using a cellphone who is oblivious to the world around them.”

Laurent Gautier is Full Professor of Applied Linguistics (Germanic languages) at the Université Bourgogne Europe (Dijon, F) where he is also heading the research unit “Texte Image Language”. He has been working and publishing for about 20 years in LSP research with a focus on terminology and phraseology, including the role of neologisms in specialized fields. His object languages are mostly French, German and Dutch. The fields of specialization he has been working on include sensorics and food studies, weather and meteorology, finances, tourism and sports. From a methodological point of view, he approaches terminology and neology at the intersection of corpus linguistics, NLP and cognitive semantics. He presents a weekly radio program on RCF en Bourgogne, called “Le dessous des mots/Beyond words” where he discusses neologisms in French.