FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

As I am writing this, we are in the midst of the Paris Olympic Games which has lifted the spirits of millions of French people, including mine : ) Therefore, I have decided to highlight the French neologism ‘olympiste’ which refers to provisional cycling lanes that have been specifically set up in Paris to facilitate the traffic flow during the Olympic games.

Olympiste is a portmanteau word that derives from ‘olympique’ (olympic in English) and ‘piste’ (track).
It seems the word was first used in French newspapers as exemplified in the following sentence : Dans leur mise en place, les « olympistes » s’inspirent un peu des coronapistes.(20 minutes, Paris-IDF edition, 15 February 2023, page 3) (Source: Wiktionnaire).

It is a very interesting example as we see that it’s construction mimics that of another neologism used in the same sentence ‘coronapiste’ (provisional cycling lanes created during the pandemic). Happy Games to all!!

Dr Sandrine Peraldi is an Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, in the School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics (SLCL). She is currently Head of Linguistics and Deputy Head of School. She also coordinates SLCL Graduate Diploma in Localisation. Prior to joining UCD in 2017, she was ISIT’s Research Director over a decade. Her areas of expertise include Corpus Linguistics, Terminology, Discourse Analysis, Intercultural Communication and finally Translation Studies (MT, Post-editing, etc.) More particularly, her research is aimed at analysing terminology and communication strategies in a variety of Professional Discourse Communities (organic chemistry, renewable energies, finance, criminal legal proceedings, geology, etc.) through tool- and corpus-based approaches and with a specific focus on the conceptual organisation of specialised knowledge (multidimensionality, conceptual indeterminacy, exploitation of semantic relations, etc.)

Dr Peraldi has been involved in multiple EU-funded projects (QUALETRA, TransCert, PICT, AGORA, etc.) and has an extensive expertise in developing successful action research projects, enabling students to engage with researchers and industry on research-led projects. Her latest funded research project entitled Interactional Variation Online (https://ivohub.com/) is aimed at examining virtual workplace communication (through Zoom, Teams, etc.) to understand communicative differences between face-to-face and online interactions and gain depth of insight into the potential barriers to effective communication. The project particularly focuses on non-verbal communication through the analysis of a multimodal corpus. Sandrine recently joined the European Network On Lexical Innovation (ENEOLI) Cost Action project aimed at highlighting the importance and visibility of neology in academic and professional settings (https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA22126/). Full profile available here: https://people.ucd.ie/sandrine.peraldi