CIDL25 Workshop: Neology: Past and Present
Short Title: CIDL25
Theme: Neology: Past and Present

Date: 21-Nov-2025 - 22-Nov-2025
Location: Bucharest, Romania
Contact: Monica Vasileanu
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://litere.ro/cidl-en/

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Lexicography; Morphology

Submission Deadline: 15-Sep-2025

Date: 21-22 November, 2025
Venue: Faculty of Letters, 5-7 Edgar Quinet St., Bucharest, Romania (and online)
Conference languages: Romanian, English, French
Convenors: Cristian Moroianu, Monica Vasileanu, Gabriela Stoica
Registration fee: 300 RON/60 euro; for PhD students or online participation, 150 RON/30 euro.

A neologism is generally understood as a new word, due to tradition and to its remote etymology of the term, whereby the Greek νέος “new” and λόγος “word” are still recognizable. However, etymological transparency does not bring terminological clarity, as evidenced by the lack of an operational definition of neologism.
This workshop proposes a reappraisal of the concepts of neologism and neology, starting from the following questions:
• What type of language units may be considered neologisms? While neologism dictionaries generally include new words, a broader understanding of the term also includes recently emerged morphemes or phrases in a language, as well as new meanings of a pre-existing lexical unit (Picone 1996, Moroianu 2008).
• What are the sources and processes of neologism formation? In Romanian linguistics, neologisms are generally associated with external sources, e.g. Latin-Romance borrowings (Groza 2012), whereas in European linguistics, neologisms also include words coined via regular morphological processes, such as affixation, compounding, etc. (Pană Dindelegan et al. 2023).
• How new are neologisms? While in Romanian linguistics the term neologism refers even to borrowings that are 200 years old (Dimitrescu 1982), Brown and Miller (2014) argue that the neologisms of 2012 will lose their neologism status “within a year or two.”
• What is the relation between new words and neologisms? In many dictionaries (e.g., Algeo 1991, OED3), the two terms are used interchangeably, whereas other researchers consider that neologisms are only those new words that have been adopted by speakers and thus become part of the language, as opposed to occasionalisms, which are ephemeral (Bauer 2001, Mattiello 2017). According to Schmid (2008), the status of a neologism is transitional, between that of an occasionalism and that of an ordinary word integrated into the language.
• How is the novelty of a word assessed? What may seem new to one speaker may not be new to another (Sablayrolles 2006), and the irregular processes of innovation tend to trigger a stronger “neology feeling” (Lombard and Huyghe 2020).
• What is the relation between neologisms and dictionaries? What are the criteria for including new words in dictionaries (see some suggestions in Diamond 2016)? What are the consequences of dictionary inclusion for their status?
• What is the diachronic dynamics of neologisms? How does the lexical innovation process differ across historical periods? How do extralinguistic factors influence vocabulary enrichment? For instance, how does the lexical innovation in (early) modern Romanian (Lupu 1999, Ursu 2004, 2006, 2011) differ from the current situation, in which English has gained the status of a global lingua franca (Crystal 2003)?

In addition to the questions above, we welcome papers addressing:
• the stages of neologism creation, from code-switching to an integrated lexeme;
• types of neologisms and the competition between them: lexical borrowings, semantic neologisms, calques, etc.
• the diachronic vitality of neologisms: from neologism to archaism;
• the relationship between neologisms and their older equivalents;
• case studies on neologisms triggered by historical events (e.g., the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic);
• neology and the diachronic refinement of certain lexical-semantic fields;
• neology and the formation of specialized terminologies;
• methods for identifying neologisms and for studying perceptions of neologisms;
• the adaptation of neological borrowings to the phonological and morphological features of the target language.

Abstracts no longer than 500 words (including references) should be sent to [email protected] by 15 September 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be received by 1 October 2025.

The workshop Neology: Past and Present is organized as part of The 25th International Conference of the Department of Linguistics, whose keynote speakers are Robyn Carston (University College London) and Lívia Körtvélyessy (Pavol Jozef Šafárik University of Košice, Slovakia).

References
Algeo, John, 1991, Fifty years among the new words: A dictionary of neologisms, 1941-1991, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bauer, Laurie, 2001, Morphological Productivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Keith, John Miller, 2014, The Cambridge Dictionary of Linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, David, 2003, English as a global language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diamond, G., 2016, “Making decisions about inclusion and exclusion”, in Philip Durkin (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 532–545.
Dimitrescu, Florica, 1982, Dicționar de cuvinte recente, București: Albatros.
Groza, Liviu, 2012, Elemente de lexicologie, ediția a II-a, București: Editura Universității din București.
Lombard, Alizée, Richard Huyghe, 2020, Catégorisation comme néologisme et sentiment des locuteurs. Langue française, 207(3), 123-138.
Lupu, Coman, 1999, Lexicografia românească în procesul de occidentalizare latino-romanică a limbii române moderne (1780-1860), Bucureşti: Logos.
Mattiello, Elisa, 2017, Analogy in word-formation: A study of English neologisms and occasionalisms. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Moroianu, Cristian, 2008, Dicționar etimologic de antonime neologice, București: Editura Universității din București.
OED, Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, www.oed.com.
Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela, Rodica Zafiu, Adina Dragomirescu, Alexandru Nicolae, Adnana Boioc-Apintei, 2023, Dicționar de termeni gramaticali și concepte lingvistice conexe, București: Univers Enciclopedic.
Picone, Michael D., 1996, Anglicisms, neologisms and dynamic French, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sablayrolles, Jean-François 2006, La néologie aujourd’hui, in Claude Gruaz (ed.), A la recherche du mot: De la langue au discours, Lambert-Lucas, 141-157.
Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2008. New Words in the Mind: Concept-formation and Entrenchment of Neologisms. Anglia, 126(1), 1-36.
Ursu, N.A., D. Ursu, 2004, Împrumutul lexical în procesul modernizării limbii române literare (1760-1860). Studiu lingvistic şi de istorie culturală, vol. I; 2006, vol II. Repertoriul de cuvinte şi forme; 2011, vol. III, Iaşi, Editura Cronica.