LANGUAGE SO OFTEN FAILS US: COINING NEW WORDS TO UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT WE LIVE IN: A CASE STUDY OF RUDY FRANCISCO

Abstract

The ever-changing world requires new vocabulary for humans to understand certain concepts that have existed for a longer period of time but have never been labelled. This paper deals with the form and meaning of the newly-coined words in a poetry collection I'll Fly Away by American-Belizean poet Rudy Francisco. A thorough morphological analysis will be given in order to conclude whether these words follow the usual word-formation processes or their form is gone astray from the English language and is not rule-governed at all. By referring to the previously done research on coinages that come into the language, there will be a word about various characteristics proposed by Peter Hohenhaus and Pavol Štekauer that these words might have and share among one another, therefore hapax legomena, nonce-formations and neologisms will all be discussed about respectively. Most of the words that the poet came up with represent a certain personal context that many readers can relate to, hence context-dependency of these hapax legomena will be observed in a great deal. The analysis of 12 newly-coined words from the given corpus is necessary because they might enter the language and therefore the people that live the same or similar life as the poet will finally be able to understand certain phenomena in their everyday life.