New loan words in the Neologismenwörterbuch: corpus-based development of lexicographic information for an online dictionary of contemporary German

Abstract

The majority of new words in dictionaries are included following a certain period of time during which they have become more frequent in use and established morphosyntactic and orthographic features consistent with the language system they are borrowed into. In case of borrowed new words, inclusion often takes place at a transitional state of assimilation to the language system, where delayed orthographic or phonetic change cannot be ruled out and the differentiation between standard-conforming and non-standard orthographic word forms of a lemma oftentimes depends on the proximity between the writing systems of the donor and the recipient language. Following a brief overview of loan words and their lexicographical description in the Neologismenwörterbuch, a specialized online dictionary for neologisms in contemporary German, this paper presents findings of an investigative case study on dictionary entries for a neologism borrowed from a logographic language system and discusses the potential of a corpus-based description of new loan words.