About Occasionalism

To our knowledge, nonce-formation, a provisional definition of which could be " new complex word[s] created by a speaker/writer on the spur of the moment to cover some immediate need" (Bauer, 1983 : 45) have received little attention from the community of French morphologists. Yet, all the conditions are now in place for this subject to emerge, in a scientific context where studies in morphology are no longer satisfied with words extracted from dictionaries but which base their methodology more and more on the exploration and collection of real data. By definition, a nonce-formation is expected to be absent from dictionaries (actually, the situation is more complex, as the paper will show), and these ' contextual formations' cannot be analyzed out of the context in which they occur. In this respect, the web and its derived corpora constitute key resources. This is particularly true as far as forums are concerned, where web users speak freely, allowing freedom to what they consider to be their creative potential. In this paper, after having defined the notion of nonce-formation, we make use of a corpus resulting from previous research, in order to identify the regular patterns that favor their emergence, in other words, to propose a grammar for nonce-formation.