Volume 126, Issue 1

So far, the study of new words and the early stages of their lexicalization and institutionalization has focused very much on the structural and semantic changes involved as well as on the gradual spread of words in a speech community. This paper focuses on insights into the concomitant processes taking place in language users' minds. It takes up ideas on concept-formation and hypostatization put forward in the philosophy of language, word-formation and lexical semantics and relates them to recent evidence on the processing and storage of nonce-formations and recently coined complex words collected by psycholinguists and neurolinguists. The role of frequency of exposure and semantic transparency in the increasing entrenchment of concepts in language users' memories is discussed. Effects of hypostatization – the subjective impression that the existence of a word suggests the existence of a class of things denoted by the word – are shown to be very strong even in the early phases of the establishment of new words, and pragmatic exploitations of these effects are explored.

Words used for societal units do not always translate well from one language to another, and present difficulties within one language considered from age to age. The family unit is ideally so overlaid with love and sentiment, so fundamental to the sweet content of father, mother, children, and perhaps others closely tied or loosely connected by blood or affinity that it is hard for us to believe that there appears not to have been in Anglo-Saxon England a native word for ‘the family’ as an ideal grouping. The Anglo-Saxons had words for ‘household’, indeed with a pater familias very much at the head, and the unit including wife and children of course, but equally as a matter of course, servants and slaves in the house and in the fields, and cattle and sheep, often a very large unit. Many of the words used for such a unit are derivatives and compounds of hiw , and that is related to hi(gi)d , the word used for a unit of land, the ‘hide’. That unit is, however, not of some standard land measure, but probably of a variable area one or more of which would be sufficient to sustain a household, large or small, including monastic households, some of them very large with lands of many hides. One might wish to understand their unit, the ‘hide’, as consisting of some definite number of acres. That does not apply. There are several other Old English words for some kind of family unit, sibb , a word for the ‘extended family’ and for ‘peace’, and cynn , a word for ‘tribe, race’, and contained in post-Anglo-Saxon kith and kin . These words are not treated in this paper, which has the complexities of hiw and derivatives and compounds at its centre.

Most accounts of Wulfstan's bombastic homiletic style ground the archbishop's motivations in his pastoral duties, but it is also clear that his political and social thought had a great influence on the forms of his homilies. In order to understand better the methods and motivations of Wulfstan's homiletic style, this article explores a single, yet very important, element of that style: nominal compounds. Wulfstan's use of compounds comes in two varieties: first, compounds often tend to cluster in the long lists of sins in the ‘exhortatory’ homilies, and, second, rare or unique compounds occur singly in various homilies. In both cases, the compounds call attention to and promote Wulfstan's concern for social stability. The great instability in England in the early eleventh century, according to Wulfstan, required special addressing by the church, and, in response to this perceived need, he crafted his rhetoric and use of nominal compounds around the cause to engage his audience and advance his social vision.