Lexical Innovations (Neologisms) in Children’s Speech: Evidence from Greek
Lexical Innovations (Neologisms) in Children’s Speech: Evidence from Greek

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims at studying the lexical innovations in Greek preschool children’s speech. Lexical creativity is a widespread phenomenon in childhood: the frequency and ease with which children coin words indicate that children have already perceived the existence of word formation devices and they try to apply principles governing the word formation system. The core of this paper focuses mainly on derivational neologisms: we will make an attempt to investigate to what extent Greek preschoolers have mastered specific features of derivational rules in their language, what kind of meanings they most frequently create and which forms they prefer to use to express the intended meanings.

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