Orð og tunga - 26.04.2018, Page 53

42 Orð og tunga
Arnon & Snider 2010). Despite their shortcomings, traditional lexico-
graphic databases represent signifi cant resources and vast amounts
of eff ort, and it would be desirable to fi nd ways of making use of
them that meet today’s standards.
The data presented in this study include a number of words that are
probably nonce formations and may never have become established
in common usage; at least, their att estations in ROH are restricted to
a single text and they do not appear in standard dictionaries. How-
ever, the possibility of their creation and their intelligibility to readers
and hearers depend on a shared context for interpretation of nonce
compounds (cf. Downing 1977). This context includes non-linguistic
factors such as literary and artistic trends as well as the political situa-
tion. In the period leading into the Cold War, as modernism emerged
in Icelandic poetry and arts, the atom became a potent symbol for
both the cultural and political climate of the time.
The focus here is on compounds formed with the prefi x atóm- that
relate to the atom poets and their context, emphasizing the cultural
connotations of the words in light of the att estations found in the ar-
chive.
3 Lexical creativity and productivity
There has been much discussion of the relationship among produc-
tivity, analogy and creativity in word formation. The view favored
here is that productivity is a gradient property (cf. Bauer 2001); that
rather than a diff erence in kind between productivity and analogy
there are variable prototype and frequency eff ects (cf. Bybee 2001);
and that word formation is always creative, though it varies in its
degree of self-consciousness. Ronneberger-Sibold (2000:103) refers to
the ability to coin words as “creative competence”.
Creative competence is our capacity to exceed the limits of
our linguistic system in a creative manner, thereby anticipat-
ing the reactions of the other members of our speech commu-
nity in order to infl uence them in a certain way. This means
that creative competence is not a hermetic or individual phe-
nomenon – in this case it would not be a part of linguistic
competence in the strict sense – but a social one. (Ronneberg-
er-Sibold 2000:103)
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