Abstract
As can be witnessed in projects such as The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Prucher, Jeff. 2007. Brave new words: The Oxford dictionary of science fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press), science fiction has been fertile ground for the creation of new words and concepts. Whereas the aforementioned dictionary was constructed by eliciting examples and citations from volunteers, this paper presents an initial foray into data-driven methods for uncovering lexis unique to science fiction. Words unique to science fiction texts are extracted by comparing a science fiction corpus against the British National Corpus (BNC Consortium. 2007. The British National Corpus, XML edition. Oxford Text Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/2554 (accessed 29 June 2022)) to produce a list of 306 neologisms from 74 texts. In addition, this study seeks to examine the ways in which authors impart the meaning of such words to the reader, drawing on frameworks of semantic word relations and work in cognitive linguistics. This reveals the use of definitions and glosses by the authors, both in narration and direct speech, co-occurrence with synonyms, and the drip-feeding of attributes pertaining to the concept being referenced. In addition, characters can be shown to struggle with the concepts to which neologisms refer, allowing authors to explore themes of alienation and other-worldliness.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Professor Antoinette Renouf and colleagues for their work in constructing the corpus used in this study.
See Table 2.
The books that make up the science fiction corpus (SFC).
Title | Author | Year first published | Number of words |
---|---|---|---|
News from Nowhere | Morris, William | 1890 | 49,755 |
The Time Machine | Wells, H. G. | 1895 | 32,606 |
The War of the Worlds | Wells, H. G. | 1898 | 60,522 |
The Land Ironclads | Wells, H. G. | 1903 | 8,405 |
A Modern Utopia | Wells, H. G. | 1905 | 87,402 |
Finis | Pollack, Frank L. | 1906 | 4,022 |
As Easy as ABC | Kipling, Rudyard | 1912 | 10,329 |
We (English translation by Gregory Zilboorg) | Zamyatin, Yevgeny | 1924 | 64,506 |
The Metal Man | Williamson, Jack | 1928 | 4,838 |
Brave New World | Huxley, Aldous | 1932 | 65,330 |
A Martian Odyssey | Weinbaum, Stanley G. | 1934 | 10,365 |
Night | Campbell, John W. | 1935 | 8,187 |
By His Bootstraps | Heinlein, Robert | 1941 | 20,995 |
Desertion | Simak, Clifford D. | 1944 | 4,496 |
The Piper’s Son | Padgett, Lewis | 1945 | 10,076 |
The Monster | van Vogt, Alfred E. | 1948 | 6,652 |
The Sentinel | Clarke, Arthur C. | 1948 | 3,807 |
1984 | Orwell, George | 1949 | 103,967 |
I, Robot | Asimov, Issac | 1950 | 71,760 |
The Second Night of Summer | Schmitz, James H. | 1950 | 10,255 |
The Voyage of the Space Beagle | van Vogt, Alfred E. | 1950 | 74,098 |
Second Dawn | Clarke, Arthur C. | 1951 | 12,299 |
The Day of the Triffids | Wyndham, John | 1951 | 92,125 |
Crucifixus Etiam | Miller, Walter M. | 1953 | 7,425 |
Fahrenheit 451 | Bradbury, Ray | 1953 | 47,022 |
The Tunnel under the World | Pohl, Frederik | 1954 | 11,499 |
The Naked Lunch | Burroughs, William | 1959 | 62,071 |
Guardians of Time | Anderson, Poul | 1960 | 11,275 |
Stranger in a Strange Land | Heinlein, Robert | 1961 | 213,767 |
The Ballad of Lost C’Mell | Smith, Cordwainer | 1962 | 7,591 |
Billenium | Ballard, J. G. | 1962 | 5,977 |
The Man in the High Castle | Dick, Philip K. | 1962 | 80,657 |
The Rest of the Robots | Asimov, Issac | 1964 | 51,651 |
Semley’s Necklace | Le Guin, Ursula K. | 1964 | 7,577 |
Who Can Replace a Man | Aldiss, Brian | 1965 | 3,237 |
How Beautiful with Banners | Blish, James | 1966 | 3,907 |
A Criminal Act | Harrison, Harry | 1967 | 5,259 |
Problems of Creativeness | Disch, Thomas M. | 1967 | 9,008 |
2001: A Space Odyssey | Clarke, Arthur C. | 1968 | 61,265 |
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep | Dick, Philip K. | 1968 | 63,454 |
The Left Hand of Darkness | Le Guin, Ursula K. | 1969 | 87,234 |
Ubik | Dick, Philip K. | 1969 | 68,220 |
How the Whip Came Back | Wolfe, Gene | 1970 | 5,959 |
To Your Scattered Bodies Go | Farmer, Philipe J. | 1971 | 77,294 |
Cloak of Anarchy | Niven, Larry | 1972 | 7,634 |
A Thing of Beauty | Spinrad, Norman | 1973 | 6,085 |
Walk to the End of the World | Charnas, Susie McKee | 1974 | 74,268 |
The Female Man | Russ, Joanna | 1975 | 69,499 |
Woman on the Edge of Time | Piercy, Marge | 1976 | 140,676 |
The Screwfly Solution | Sheldon, Raccoona | 1977 | 8,389 |
Motherlines | Charnas, Susie McKee | 1978 | 78,428 |
Alien | Foster, Alan D. | 1979 | 68,976 |
Shikasta | Lessing, Doris | 1979 | 161,590 |
The Way of Cross and Dragon | Martin, George R. R. | 1979 | 7,409 |
The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five | Lessing, Doris | 1980 | 99,630 |
Burning Chrome | Gibson, William | 1982 | 7,960 |
Neuromancer | Gibson, William | 1984 | 80,933 |
Silicon Muse | Schenck, Hilbert | 1984 | 8,043 |
The Handmaid’s Tale | Atwood, Margaret | 1985 | 94,360 |
Aliens | Foster, Alan D. | 1986 | 78,577 |
A Gift from the Culture | Banks, Iain M. | 1987 | 6,496 |
Cleaning Up | Banks, Iain M. | 1987 | 5,749 |
Descendant | Banks, Iain M. | 1987 | 8,309 |
Karl and the Ogre | McAuley, Paul J. | 1988 | 6,039 |
Road of Skulls | Banks, Iain M. | 1988 | 1,599 |
Odd Attachment | Banks, Iain M. | 1989 | 2,017 |
Piece | Banks, Iain M. | 1989 | 3,020 |
The State of the Art | Banks, Iain M. | 1989 | 34,305 |
Swarm | Sterling, Bruce | 1989 | 9,678 |
The Difference Engine | Gibson, William | 1990 | 140,059 |
Piecework | Brin, David | 1991 | 10,485 |
Alien 3 | Foster, Alan D. | 1992 | 57,707 |
Red Mars | Robinson, Kim Stanley | 1992 | 213,794 |
The Furies | Charnas, Susie McKee | 1994 | 121,206 |
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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Introduction to the special issue on “The language of science fiction”
- The impact of Star Wars on the English language: Star Wars-derived words and constructions in present-day English corpora
- “To boldly go where no man has gone before”: how iconic is the Star Trek split infinitive?
- From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture
- The language of men and women in Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: Discovery
- “So, I trucked out to the border, learned to say ain’t, came to find work”: the sociolinguistics of Firefly
- Subverting motion in science fiction? Beam in the Star Trek TV series
- Perceiving with strangeness: quantifying a style of altered consciousness as estrangement in a corpus of 1960s American science fiction
- “There was much new to grok”: an analysis of word coinage in science fiction literature
- Cyberpunk, steampunk, and all that punk: genre names and their uses across communities
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Introduction to the special issue on “The language of science fiction”
- The impact of Star Wars on the English language: Star Wars-derived words and constructions in present-day English corpora
- “To boldly go where no man has gone before”: how iconic is the Star Trek split infinitive?
- From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture
- The language of men and women in Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: Discovery
- “So, I trucked out to the border, learned to say ain’t, came to find work”: the sociolinguistics of Firefly
- Subverting motion in science fiction? Beam in the Star Trek TV series
- Perceiving with strangeness: quantifying a style of altered consciousness as estrangement in a corpus of 1960s American science fiction
- “There was much new to grok”: an analysis of word coinage in science fiction literature
- Cyberpunk, steampunk, and all that punk: genre names and their uses across communities