Inlinguistics,anonce word—also called anoccasionalism—is any word (lexeme), or any sequence ofsoundsorletters,created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word in a given language.[1][2]Nonce words have a variety of functions and are most commonly used for humor, poetry, children's literature, linguistic experiments, psychological studies, and medical diagnoses, or they arise by accident.
Some nonce words have a meaning at their inception or gradually acquire a fixed meaning inferred from context and use, but if they eventually become an established part of the language (neologisms), they stop being nonce words.[3]Other nonce words may be essentially meaningless and disposable (nonsense words), but they are useful for exactly that reason—the wordswugandblicketfor instance were invented by researchers to be used in child language testing.[4]Nonsense words often shareorthographicandphoneticsimilarity with (meaningful) words,[5]as is the case withpseudowords,which make no sense but can still be pronounced in accordance with a language'sphonotactic rules.[6]Such invented words are used by psychology and linguistics researchers and educators as tools to assess a learner's phonetic decoding ability, and the ability to infer the (hypothetical) meaning of a nonsense word from context is used to test forbrain damage.[7]Proper namesof real or fictional entities sometimes originate as nonce words.
The term is used because such a word is created "for the nonce"(i.e., for the time being, or this once),[2]: 455 coming fromJames Murray,editor of theOxford English Dictionary.[8]: 25 Some analyses consider nonce words to fall broadly underneologisms,which are usually defined as words relatively recently accepted into a language's vocabulary;[9]other analyses do not.[3]
Types of nonce words
editA variety of more specific concepts used by scholars falls under the umbrella ofnonce words,of which overlap is also sometimes possible:
- nonsense word:a nonce word that is meaningless
- nonword:a nonsense word that is not even pronounceable in a particular language
- pseudoword:a nonsense word that still follows thephonotacticsof a particular language and is therefore pronounceable, feeling to native speakers like a possible word (for example, in English,blurkis a pseudoword, butbldzkgis a nonword); thus, pseudowords follow a language's phonetic rules but have no meaning[10]
- ghost word:a nonce word authoritatively described in areference workthat turns out to have originated from atypoor other simple error
- protologism:a nonce word that has achieved repeated usage, perhaps even by a small group but not beyond that (an intermediate step towards aneologism)
- stunt word:a nonce word intentionally coined to demonstrate the creator's cleverness or elicit an emotional reaction, such as admiration or laughter; such words are often noted in the works ofDr. Seuss,as in "Sometimes I am quite certain there's a Jertain in the curtain", in which the one-time use ofJertainrefers to some unspecified fictional creature purely invented to create a whimsical rhyme withcertainandcurtain[11]
Similar or related concepts
editMany types of other words can also be meaningful nonce words, as is true of mostsniglets(words, often stunt words, explicitly coined in the absence of any relevant dictionary word). Other types of misinterpretations or humorous re-wordings can also be nonce words, as may occur inword play,such as certain examples ofpuns,spoonerisms,malapropisms,etc. Furthermore, meaningless nonce words can occur unintentionally or spontaneously, for instance througherrors(typographicalor otherwise) or throughkeysmashes.
In child development studies
editNonce words are sometimes used to study thedevelopment of languagein children, because they allow researchers to test how children treat words of which they have no prior knowledge. This permits inferences about the default assumptions children make about new word meanings, syntactic structure, etc. "Wug" is among the earliest known nonce words used in language learning studies, and is best known for its use inJean Berko's "Wug test", in which children were presented with a novel object, called a wug, and then shown multiple instances of the object and asked to complete a sentence that elicits a plural form—e.g., "This is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two...?" The use of the plural form "wugs" by the children suggests that they have applied a plural rule to the form, and that this knowledge is not specific to prior experience with the word but applies to most English nouns, whether familiar or novel.[12]
Nancy N. Soja,Susan Carey,andElizabeth Spelkeused "blicket", "stad", "mell", "coodle", "doff", "tannin", "fitch", and "tulver" as nonce words when testing to see if children's knowledge of the distinction between non-solid substances and solid objects preceded or followed their knowledge of the distinction betweenmass nounsandcount nouns.[13]
In literature
editA poem bySeamus Heaneytitled "Nonce Words" is included in his collectionDistrict and Circle.[14]David Crystalreportedfluddle,which he understood to mean a water spillage between a puddle and a flood, invented by the speaker because no suitable word existed. Crystal speculated in 1995 that it might enter the English language if it proved popular.[2]Boubaandkikiare used to demonstrate a connection between the sound of a word and its meaning.Grok,coined byRobert HeinleininStranger in a Strange Land,is now used by many to mean "deeply and intuitively understand".[15]The poem "Jabberwocky"is full of nonce words, of which two,chortleandgalumph,have entered into common use.[15]The novelFinnegans Wakeusedquark( "three quarks for Muster Mark" ) as a nonce word; the physicistMurray Gell-Mannadopted it as the name of asubatomic particle.[16]
See also
edit
Examples of nonce-word articles
editReferences
edit- ^"Nonce Word".Cambridge Dictionaries Online.2011.Retrieved6 November2012.
- ^abcThe Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language.Ed.David Crystal.Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1995, p. 132.ISBN0521401798
- ^abCrystal, David. (1997)A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics(4th Edition). Oxford and Cambridge (Mass., USA): Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
- ^Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society,2001,p. 388
- ^Raymond M. Klein; Patricia A. McMullen (1999).Converging Methods for Understanding Reading and Dyslexia.MIT Press. pp. 67–68.ISBN978-0-262-11247-5.
- ^Natalie Wilson Rathvon (2004).Early Reading Assessment: A Practitioner's Handbook.Guilford Press. p. 138.ISBN978-1-57230-984-5.
- ^Muriel Deutsch Lezak (2004).Neuropsychological Assessment 4e.Oxford University Press. p. 596.ISBN978-0-19-511121-7.
- ^Mattiello, Elisa. (2017).Analogy in Word-formation: a Study of English Neologisms and Occasionalisms.Berlin/Boston, GERMANY: De Gruyter Mouton.ISBN978-3-11-055141-9.OCLC988760787.
- ^Malmkjaer, Kirsten. (Ed.) (2006)The Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia.eBook edition. London & New York:Routledge,p. 601.ISBN0-203-43286-X
- ^"DIBELS Nonsense Word Fluency, University of Oregon".Archived fromthe originalon 2021-04-18.Retrieved2020-04-23.
- ^"STUNT WORD".Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 3 April 2019.
- ^Lise Menn; Nan Bernstein Ratner (2000). "In the Beginning Was the Wug". InLise Menn;Nan Bernstein Ratner(eds.).Methods for Studying Language Production.Lawrence Erlbaum associates. pp. 1–26.ISBN978-0-8058-3033-0.
- ^Soja, Nancy N.; Carey, Susan; Spelke, Elizabeth S. (1991-02-01)."Ontological categories guide young children's inductions of word meaning: Object terms and substance terms".Cognition.38(2): 179–211.doi:10.1016/0010-0277(91)90051-5.
- ^Heaney, Seamus (2006).District and Circle.Faber and Faber. no. 28.ISBN0-571-23097-0.
- ^ab"OED online".Oxford University Press.Retrieved17 August2022.
- ^Gell-Mann, Murray (1995).The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.Henry Holt and Co.p. 180.ISBN978-0-8050-7253-2.