New compound words and blends in French as lexical creativity and wordplay in author’s poetry

The paper deals with the study of the compound words and blends created in our poetry as manifestation of wordplay and lexical creativity. The aim of the paper is to describe the word-formation features of compound words in the author’s poetry. The research material comprises thirty-two words coined in eleven poems in French, published in this paper for the first time. The research methods include structural, semantic and functional analyses of the newly formed compound words and blends in French. The paper presents the definition of wordplay based on the language levels involved in its creation (graphic, phonetic, lexical, grammatical, syntactic). It is revealed that the morphological models of the newly coined compound words and blends include the following patterns: Noun + Noun (amourlangue), Noun + Verb (poèmécrire), Adjective used adverbially or Adverb of manner + Verb (fortaimer). From a semantic perspective, the compound verbs predominantly express feelings. The meaning of the analysed compound words is transparent and can be identified through their constitutive elements. The created compound words and blends convey the intensity of the feeling and condense the additional sense in one lexical unit, thereby contributing to textual conciseness and linguistic economy. In future studies of lexical creation, I propose to consider approaches to wordplay which treat it as deliberate creation based on speakers’ linguistic intuition (Lecolle), particularly in relation to the deliberate or non-deliberate nature of wordplay creation. The first creation of wordplay may be heuristic, the underlying model of creation can later be extended and used in the formation of lexical units. Introspection and surveys of authors who create new words may serve as effective tools for studying the process of lexical creation, including also cases involving both native speakers of French and learners of French, given the language’s flexibility and its well-documented propensity for lexical innovation.