The NeoCrawler: identifying and retrieving neologisms from the internet and monitoring ongoing change

Abstract

Why do some new words manage to enter the lexicon and stay there while others drop out of use and are neither used nor heard anymore? Of interest to both lay people and linguists, this question has not been answered in an empirically convincing manner to date, mainly because systematic methods have not yet been found for spotting new words as soon as possible after their first occurrence and monitoring their early development and spread as exhaustively as possible. In this paper we present a new and improved tool which is designed to accomplish precisely these tasks when applied to material from the Internet. Following a brief review of existing tools for retrieving linguistic data from the Web (Section 2), we will introduce in some detail a tailor-made webcrawler, the so-called NeoCrawler, which identifies and retrieves neologisms from the Internet and stores data necessary for the systematic monitoring of their early development with regard to form and meaning as well as spread (Section 3). Following this description, we will present a case study discussing the results of an analysis of the neologism detweet with regard to its di¤usion, institutionalization, lexicalization and lexical networkformation (Section 4). The study indicates that the NeoCrawler can indeed be applied fruitfully in the study of ongoing processes relating to how the meanings and forms of new words are negotiated in the speech community, how words spread in the early stages of their life cycles and how they begin to establish themselves in lexical and semantic networks.

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