CoInIng nonCE WoRDs: ConTRAsTIVE REsEARCh BAsED on A noVEL

: Nonce words or occasionalisms are coined for a particular occasion and usually they are used just once. It is especially difficult when such newly created words have to be translated to another language. This article studies John Harding’s novel Florence & Giles and its Bulgarian translation (by Vladimir Molev). It is a sinister Gothic story told by the 12-year-old Florence living in an isolated New England man-sion in 1891. She distorts words by transforming them into other parts of speech, e.g. nouns and adjectives are turned into verbs, nouns into adjectives, adverbs and prepo-sitions into verbs, etc. At first, it could be annoying to the reader, however, once you get used to her narration, it is both fanciful and charming. This research studies the intensely concentrated nonce words in the text and their equivalents in Bulgarian from the point of view of their grammatical, word-formative and semantic characteristics. The contrastive method when applied to the parallel corpus shows some similarities and a lot of differences in the particular characteristics of nonce words due to the spe - cifics of the two languages under discussion.


Introduction
Florence & Giles is an ominous Gothic tale set in a distant and dilapidated New England mansion.Two orphaned half-siblings (Florence and Giles share only a father) live there ignored by their guardian uncle but under the daily care of domestic staff.The staff is all newly employed and there is very little information about the family history.At the beginning, the children live in isolated existence and although their uncle never visits them, he provides for their needs.Under his instruction the 12-year-old Florence is not to be educated but in spite of his will she has educated herself by secretly devouring the books that remain untouched on the dusty and neglected shelves hidden away in the library.She has taught herself languages she had never heard spoken.Inspired by the works of Dickens, Trollope and her true love, Shakespeare, Florence has developed a unique language of her own.She narrates her own story in a fairly unusual style.At first the reader could be a little vexed and distracted because of Florence's unique style of communicating, however, as she is persistent in the use of her nonce words, the reader also gets used to her narration.
The two children enjoy each other's company until Giles is sent away to school.Then Florence meets the neighbouring boy, Theo, and becomes friends with him.She has no time to feel lonely as her day and night are full of events.By day, she confines to her hidden place to read.By night, she sleepwalks the corridors.She is haunted by a repeated dream in which a strange woman endangers her younger brother Giles's life.Sometimes Florence just pretends to sleepwalk so that she can search the house for some information about her unknown past.Suddenly, Giles returns home because he is bullied at school and is to be educated by a governess.The first governess, Miss Whittaker, doesn't last long before she "tragicks upon the lake".After her unexpected death a second teacher, Miss Taylor, arrives, and Florence is immediately convinced that the new governess is an evil spirit who means to hurt Giles.She takes on the extremely risky task to outsmart and expose her.In order to defeat this mighty supernatural fiend, and with no adult to help her, Florence must use all her brainpower and ingenuity to save her little brother and protect her own world.No further details about the plot are necessary to persuade the reader that Florence & Giles is a gripping Gothic story narrated in a surprisingly different and remarkably fascinating voice.This startling narrative voice is the focus of the present article, more specifically the numerous nonce words invented by Florence and their equivalents in the Bulgarian translation of the book.We study the grammatical, word-formative and semantic characteristics of the nonce words used in both the original of the book and its translation.

Theoretical background
Nonce words are a subtype of neologisms.By definition they do not require to be widely known or permanent.They are seen as spontaneously coined for a specific situation.The corresponding Bulgarian term is оказионализми / occasionalisms.Similarly to neologisms they are time dependent as they are comparatively recent phenomena that may be in a process of being accepted as mainstream words.According to Linguistics Encyclopedia (2006, p. 601), nonce-formation "is a neologism used in just one occasion" and "will not become a regularly used linguistic item" 1 .Defined as vocabulary units that are unusual, nonce or occasional words do not conform to conventional language rules, because they are characterized by a certain individual meaning determined in a specific context.Thus nonce words are considered as speech phenomena which do not correspond to standard language, their meaning depends on the context and they express the personal opinion of the speaker.
Whereas neologisms refer to new objects and facts of language and they originate from the communicative needs of the society, nonce words are claimed to be "individual author's coinages created according to unusual or unproductive wordformative patterns, the facts of speech which stem from the aims of the utterance and the context, outside of which they are rarely used" (Holtvian & Severynchuk, 2015, p. 213).Sometimes these two types of language units also differ in their function.The main function of neologisms is to denote new objects, phenomena, etc.The central function of the nonce words is the expressive one.They are invented and used for artistic purposes to describe a fictional reality and attract the readers' attention.
Therefore, considering the specifics of nonce words, it is possible to indicate the following features: 1. Nonce words are created to serve the purposes of a specific situation; 2. Their newness and unusualness to listeners and readers is what distinguishes nonce words from neologisms which gradually lose their novelty over time; 3. The appearance of nonce words is unpredictable; 4.An inherent feature of nonce words is their high expressiveness due to the freshness of perception and originality (cf.Gorchhanova, 2016).Sources of nonce vocabulary units are fiction books and short stories, e.g., "grok" (to understand using intuition) from Robert A. Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land; "McJob" (low-paid job) from Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture; "cyberspace" (digital network) from William Gibson's Neuromancer, etc. Sometimes titles of books become neologisms, for instance, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (a paradoxical situation from which there is no way out).Alternatively, an author's name may give rise to a neologism or a famous character of a novel, e.g., "Orwellian", originating from George Orwell's name and related to his dystopian novel about a future totalitarian state Nineteen Eighty-Four; "quixotic", referring to someone or something which is idealistic and impractical in relation to Miguel de Cervantes' romantic character Don Quixote; "scrooge", a character from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol who hates spending money.A nonce word is found in Iliad, namely παναώριος (Pope, 1985).The word's uniqueness provoked different interpretations, and the standard translation 'of all-untimely fate' or 'doomed to die young' raises objections.Pope (1985) argues what Achilles means by 'untimely' is that he is a misfit, someone who is always at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Recent studies explore the author's new formations and their analogies in the translations of Terry Pratchett's novels, Joan K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, among others.Some of the discussed problems refer to translating symbolic names (so-called speaking names) of recurrent characters from English into Bulgarian in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (Boyadzhieva, 2017), some "deeply meaningful" personal names, toponyms and nicknames from English into Bulgarian in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring (Nedelcheva, 2017), as well as the system of proper names in J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings from English into Russian as individual neologisms, which allow to represent the author's mythology (Lugovaya, 2019).
Further research deals with translation features of occasionalisms by J. Rowling in Harry Potter and the Damned Child, based on translations from English into Chinese, more specifically lexical analysis is given of the word-formation structure of spells in the text of the original and in the translated text, as well as the ways of their transmission from the source to the target language (Starikova, 2019).Translatability issues are considered in relation to wordplay and the loss of humorous effect in the Bulgarian translation of Terry Pratchett's Soul Music (Iglikova, 2013), as well as the process of unveiling the main characteristics of occasionalisms and their ways of derivation, based on J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of Rings and The Two Towers and its Russian translation (Petrov, 2019).
Other articles focus on identifying and describing phonetic occasionalisms 2 in structural and semantic aspects (Romanyuk, 2019a) or analyzing the features of the modern English occasional words in the works of J. Rowling and systematizing them according to non-standard models (Romanyuk, 2019b).A previous study on the occasionalisms in Florence & Giles' Bulgarian translation points out grammatical, semantic and word-formative aspects of these novel Bulgarian words (Savova, 2016).The present article adds to the previous re-2.Phonetic occasionalisms are combinations of phonemes which are not registered in the language.
search by studying the morphological and lexicological characteristics of the English nonce words in John Harding's book Florence & Giles and compares and contrasts them with their Bulgarian equivalents.Traditionally, occasionalisms are commented on in view of their uniqueness and expressiveness, in this novel, however, a number of nonce words are used repeatedly as part of the main character's idiolect.These "strange words" invented by Florence are not art for the art's sake.They conform to the author's idea of Florence's characterbuilding.She would like to be a writer and she is inspired by Shakespeare and his "way with words" (Harding, 2010, p. 6): The thing I liked most about Shakespeare was his free and easy way with words.It seemed that if there wasn't a word for what he wanted to say, he simply made one up.He barded the language.For making up words, he knocks any other writer dead.When I am grown and a writer myself, as I know I shall be, I intend to Shakespeare a few words of my own.I am already practising now.

Methodology
This study focuses on the highly concentrated (sometimes 6-7 per page) nonce words in the SL and their equivalents in the TL text in Florence & Giles.As these words are open-class words, i.e. verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs, we observe the grammatical categories of person, number, tense, modality, gradability, some semantic criteria, in order to define the subtypes of word classes, e.g., concrete/ abstract nouns, as well as a couple of instances of substantivization.Word-formative methods are also considered as there might be a mismatch between the word-formation processes used in the SL and TL, such as derivation, conversion, blending, composition, etc.The contrastive method when applied to the parallel corpus shows some similarities and a lot of differences in the particular characteristics of the nonce words due to the specifics of the two languages under discussion.Newmark (1988a) proposes distinct types of neologisms; a number of them are applicable to the present study: derived words, collocations, eponyms, internationalisms, phrasal words, pseudo-neologisms, transferred words.The model of derived words is very productive as they are formed by analogy with existing word-formative patterns using prefixation and suffixation, e.g., 'wakery'3 , 'unslept', 'небъдница', etc.New collocations are to be translated in context: 'to beanpole' (стърча като бобеното стъбло на Джак) or literally when they are 'transparent ', e.g., 'between-the-linesed', 'good-afternoonma'amed', 'heart-in-mouthed', etc. Eponyms are proper names which are easily translated if they refer directly to a person but if they refer to qualities or ideas, the reader may need additional explanations, e.g., 'Theoing', 'Dupinned', 'Gargeried'.Internationalisms are neologisms that are universally used, e.g., 'Robinson Crusoed', 'Armageddoned', 'Rapunzelled'.Phrasal words are restricted to English and are often more economical than their translation, e.g., 'down-nosing', 'cultured away', 'offchance'.Pseudo-neologisms are old words with new senses, e.g., 'gay' meaning joyful."They are usually translated either by a word that already exists in the TL, or by a brief functional or descriptive term" (Newmark, 1988a, p. 142).Transferred words result from transliteration of different alphabets and become 'loan words ', e.g., in English 'sphinxed', in Bulgarian 'сфинксира', etc. Newly imported objects are translated like other cultural terms, usually accompanied by a generic term and a specific detail according to the readership and situation.
Being a subtype of neologisms, nonce words are difficult to translate into the TL.It is not always possible to find an appropriate analogue in the target language, which can be explained from cultural perspective or in the political situation of the corresponding countries.This research is going to study nonce words in a particular literary text, namely John Harding's novel Florence & Giles.Additionally, this analysis will explore which of the neologism types suggested by Newmark (1988a) are attested with nonce words.We aim to reveal the similarities and differences in the use of nonce words in the original of the book and its Bulgarian translation due to language peculiarities.

Table 1. Nonce verbs
She laughed and then serioused 4 again.
Giles's absence now, when young van Hoosier and I outdoorsed, gave my visitor free rein with me.
Отсъствието на Джайлс позволи на посетителя известна волност още в първия миг, щом навънкнахме.So began the sneakery of my life.Така започна криеницата на живота ми.I duly set off for the west tower, only to be met by the most awful hope-dashery at the foot of its stairs.
(…) its layer of dust testifying to its long undisturbery.

Nonce adverbs
The kitchen, where the stove is always burny hot, is jollied by fat Meg (…).
Кухнята, където от зори до мрак бумти готварската печка, е разведрявана от дебелата Мег (…).I upped the chair and skiptoed fast to the other side of the room and stood innocenting out the window when behind me the housekeeper entered the room.
Almost half of the nonce words appear in the first part of the text (a quarter of the book) where Florence tells the story of her difficult life and her struggle for self-education and intellectual enhancement.She only uses these words in her personal narrative, not in her direct speech with the other members of the household as she keeps her creative abilities in secret.In the second part, after the arrival of Miss Taylor in the manor, which is a turning point in the book, the occasionalisms are less in their average number as Florence is quite busy with the numerous events that happen to her, mostly initiated by herself.

Word-formation of nonce words
The word-formative processes of nonce words provoke the interest of the linguists as they have as a result occasional words.These processes comply with the word-formation in each of the two languages, English and Bulgarian.In both languages there are simplexes (one-root words), e.g., mufflered 'шалосваше ', clumsying 'тромавее', duster 'прашник', unbooked 'безкнижно', etc., and complexes (two-root words), e.g., four-minuting 'четириминутие', pre-Whitaker 'предУитакърови', hope-dashery 'надеждопопарване', etc. English, however, also uses phrases that are turned into phraseological units, e.g., upand-downstairsing 'нагоре-надолувам', side-by-siding 'един-до-другнахме', two hundred-Shakespeare 'двестния Шекспир', etc.The most common wordformation method of the nonce words created by John Harding is conversion, i.e. zero derivation, a method that is non-existent in Bulgarian.Hence, the equivalents in the TL are formed by affixation.Affixation is also found in the nonce words of the SL but it is limited in scope.
The occasional verbs are mostly formed by conversion in English.The sources are mainly adjectives, e.g., difficult → to difficult; tedious → to tedious; impatient → to impatient; anxious → to anxious, etc. (see Table 11).Nouns are also used as sources of conversion to give rise to verbs: winter → to winter; brain → to brain; problem → to problem; puppy → to puppy, etc. (see Table 12).
Table 12.Noun-to-verb conversion I had never wintered much in the library, because it had no fire… Преди не бях зимувала в библиотеката, тъй като там не се палеше… (...) just when I thought to have re-just when I thought to have recovered them, when I brained an idea.
Sometimes adverbs are converted into verbs: away → to away; out → to out; inward → to inward; together → to together; down → to down, etc. (see Table 13).

Adverb-to-verb conversion
As soon as he awayed from Blithe, he would tell.

Table 14. Preposition-to-verb conversion
He came and nexted me on the couch.
I upped and overed to him.I irritabled out a hand.
Table 16.Nonce verbs with negative prefixes (...) until the clock struck the quar-until the clock struck the quarter hour before one, when I denested, slipped from the room and hurried to lunch.
Table 18.SL nonce verbs formed through composition and conversion (...) invisibling me from any who stood there, providing, of course, they no-furthered into the room.
Different variants of affixation techniques are applied to TL verbs to give rise to occasional verbs, a prefix is added where none is expected, e.g., осмутя, излюбезнича, поглавоблъскам, etc.Sometimes the original prefix is replaced, e.g., въздигам се, разбудвам, разсълзих се; in other cases more than one prefix is added to the verb base, e.g., о-без-плодя, о-без-културя, о-без-капача.In still other cases, apart from adding an unexpected prefix, the verb has lost its reflexive particle се (see Table 19).The opposite process is observed in the SL for the nonce verbs are very often reflexive, e.g., to ballet herself, to practical myself, to library myself, to couch himself, to overbanister myself, etc. (see Table 20).
There is a group of occasional verbs that are compounds originating from phrases.They are spelled either as one word or hyphenated, e.g., to upstairs/ downstairs, to cheesegrate, to beanpole, to sudden-fright, to long-corridor, to loud-and-clear, to heart-in-mouth, to next-door, to deep-breath, to coast-clear, etc.The corresponding Bulgarian equivalents are fewer in number but as innovative as the originals, e.g., главоблъскам се, нагоре-надолувам, един-додругвам, etc.In their word-formation, composition, blending and suffixation are used.Unlike the English compounds, the Bulgarian ones contain a linking vowel, e.g., глав-о-блъскам се, and a suffix, e.g., един-до-друг-вам.
Most nonce adjectives in the SL follow the word-formative patterns of participle adjectives.The main difference, however, is that they are not derived from verbs.The occasional adjectives originate basically from nouns, conforming to the formula N + -ed/ -ing = Adj., e.g., worded, desked, booked, musicked, poetried, theatred, philosophied, librarying years, etc.In the other common model, adjectives are derived from adjectives, according to the pattern Adj.+ -ed = Adj., e.g., darked, alouded, restlessed, etc. Compound nouns of the SL are combined with the grammatical marker -ed and sometimes with the negative suffix un-to make up nonce adjectives, e.g., wingbacked, armchaired, unfootfalled, unfingerprinted, etc.

Semantic transformations from the SL into the TL
The meanings of most occasionalisms coined by Florence are transparent as there is a direct relation between the new and the original word even out of context (see Table 21): In some cases complex, compound or phrasal occasionalisms have their meaning conditioned by an original collocation (see Table 22): Table 22.Nonce words derived from collocations to outdoorse (v) ← go out of door навънквам (v) ← излизам навън one's leg-lengthery (n) ← length of legs дългокрачието си (n) ← дълги крака hope-dashery (n) ← to dash s.o.'s hope надеждопопарване (n) ← попарване на надежди asthmaed up (adj.)← having asthma астматиран (adj.)← болен от астма Still the meaning of the occasional words is clear because the omitted elements (prepositions, pronouns, etc.) do not play a decisive role in the semantics of the collocation.Additionally, these new words stand out against collocations with their brevity and conciseness.Other instances of nonce words are understood only in context (see Table 23):

Не след дъл го тя вече била олитера-турена…
The meaning of the verb 'to window' may not be figured out correctly as the dictionary definition 'to place at or in a window' is not applied literally.It should be interpreted as 'he sat in his seat, smiling and waving at us through the window'.In Bulgarian 'презпрозоречно' can only be understood in collocation with the verb 'махаше'.'Unlettered' is ambiguous between lacking a letter as a symbol of an alphabet or written communication.The Bulgarian adjective 'безписмовна' is unclear in an analogical way because the meaning is also split between без писменост 'without alphabet' and без писма 'without letters'.The verb 'to book' is polysemous but an additional meaning is coined here: '(un) booked -having read (no) books'.
The semantics of nonce words that have been derived from proper nouns which denote characters in the novel depends on the context (see Table 24).
But Giles leaving home and all the Theoing I'd had had changed all that.I saw that now.
Meanwhile I read all the mornings and some of the afternoons and then Van hoosiered my way through the rest.
No matter, if I sat at the desk, I could Van hoosier the drive Ако седнех на писалището, можех да бдя за Вай Хузиър The adjective 'Theo-free', the non-finite form 'Theoing' and the verb 'van Hoosiered' as well as their Bulgarian equivalents 'обезТеоена', 'теосване', 'Ван Хузиърувах', have these particular meanings only in this context.The composite 'Theo-free', the complex adjective 'обезТеоена', the gerund 'Theoing' and the deverbal noun 'теосване' derive from the proper name Theo.Both the suffix '-free' and the prefix 'без-' when combined with the name mean 'without Theo'.The pair 'Theoing' and its counterpart 'теосване' function as verbal nouns in the context and are interpreted as 'making friends with Theo'.The family name van Hoosier gives rise to the verb 'van Hoosiered' / 'Ван Хузиърувах' which is used polysemantically to mean, on the one hand, 'to meet van Hoosier' and 'to watch for van Hoosier', on the other hand.Another case of polysemy is attested when an occasional verb is formed from the name of Shakespeare (see Table 25): Not only that, all the while I had to be one-shakespearing-twoshakespearing and if someone should speak to me and I should lose my number, И не само това, а и през цялото време трябваше да нареждам: "Един Шекспир, втори Шекспир", и ако ме заговореха и изгубех бройката, The context of the phrase 'to Shakespeare a few words' / 'ще шекспирам нови думи' suggests that it should be interpreted as 'to create new words as Shakespeare does', while 'I Frenched and Shakespeared' / 'франкофонствах и шекспирех' would mean 'I studied French and read books by Shakespeare'.Using Shakespeare in counting, e.g., 'one-Shakespearing-two-Shakespearing' resembles the children's practice to approximate the passing of a second as in 'one Mississippi, two Mississippi'.Because the word is so long, the intervals between the numbers are around one second of time.It is traditionally used by children playing hide-and-seek to count the hiding-time period.The fact that in Florence's imagination Shakespeare takes part in all kinds of nonce words is indicative of her constant preoccupation with English literature.
Florence's deep fascination with literature surfaces in some other nonce words (see Table 26): In order to understand the meaning of the occasional verb 'to Dupin' / 'дюпеня се', the reader should relate it to the fictional character created by Edgar Allan Poe, who appears in a few short stories.Dupin is the prototype of the fictional detective being able to put himself in the mind of the criminal but also combining considerable intellect with creative imagination.Therefore, the meaning of the verb should be figured out as 'to make logical inferences and reasonable conclusions'.To make it clearer to the Bulgarian reader the translator has included a footnote which says "Dupin is a character of several stories by E. A. Poe, in which he solves intricate mysteries through deduction."A similar verb is 'to Gargery' / 'Гарджъросвам' that originates in Mrs Gargery's name, a character from Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.Mrs Gargery has become a nickname for violent and cruel behaviour, hence the newly coined word has the sense of 'treating s.o./ sth ferociously'.To avoid misunderstandings the Bulgarian translator has provided an explanatory note about Mrs Gargery and what her name stands for.
Other more general eponyms rely on the readers' background knowledge to interpret the correct meaning of the nonce word (see Table 27): The occasional verb 'to Armageddon' relies on some general knowledge of both English and Bulgarian readership about the New Testament and more specifically about the last battle between good and evil before the Day of Judgement.The use of the name of Robinson Crusoe as a verb requires the reader to know that he is a shipwrecked sailor from Daniel Defoe's eponymous novel, who lives for many years on an uninhabited island.Similarly, in order to understand the association with Rapunzel, one should be familiar with the fairytale about a young woman with impossibly long hair who lives alone in a tower because she is held captive by a witch.The Bulgarian equivalent refers descriptively to the fairytale using a nickname for the main character 'Дългокоска' (long-haired).Another descriptive transfer we find with the composite nonce verb 'beanpoled'.It is expected by the native English speakers to know the classic fairytale about a poor country boy who exchanges the family cow for a few magic beans, which grow into an enormous beanstalk.The translator helps the Bulgarian readership by providing a direct reference to Jack and the Beanstalk 'като бобеното стъбло на Джак'.

Conclusion
Summing up the analysis of the peculiarities of author's occasionalisms it should be taken into account that the differences in the original and translated nonce words are due to the distinctions in the morphology and word-formation models of Bulgarian and English.The most widely used word-formative patterns in English are conversion and composition, sometimes collocations and whole quotation groups are turned into nonce verbs.Rarely, derivation is used to form negative verbs and adjectives through prefixation with de-and un-, and deverbal nouns with the suffix -ery.Bulgarian relies heavily on derivation as it uses a wide variety of prefixes and suffixes for word-formation.In the lexical systems of English and Bulgarian there are discrepancies, which are manifested in the meaning of the word, where languages often highlight different features of the same phenomenon or concept, which reflects the vision of the world inherent in this language.In other words, it is difficult for native speakers of specific languages to translate occasionalisms; in the present corpus only 15% of the English nonce words have translation counterparts, which are nonce words.However, the Bulgarian translation of Florence and Giles has managed to capture the spirit of the narration and convey it in another language.The translator is also a co-author because following John Harding's example he actually created his own occasionalisms in Bulgarian.

Table 2 .
Nonce adjectives (…) for a girl my age I am very well worded.Exceeding well worded, to speak plain.

Table 5 .
English nonce verbs used in the Past Simple Tense e.g., were side-by-siding, were hide-and-seeking, was microscoping, were history-repeating-itselfing, etc., and some constructions with modal verbs, e.g., might have pleasant afternooned, would have game-upped me, could Van Hoosier the drive, etc.The following examples are presented in context (see Table6).

Table 6 .
English nonce verbs used in the Past Progressive Tense

Table 7 .
Tenses used in translating nonce verbs from English into Bulgarian

Table 11 .
Adjective-to-verb conversionWith this promise of salvation, though, the snow difficulted me in another way.

Table 15 .
Proper noun-to-verb conversionNo matter, if I sat at the desk, I could Van hoosier the drive.Conversion is not found in the TL because of the morphological structure of Bulgarian, but instances of affixation are used instead, e.g., се бе озлочестила, разгнездвам, всериознича се, вщрауся се, смисля, etc.According to Savova

Table 17 .
TL nonce verbs formed through affixation

Table 19 .
TL nonce verbs transformed from reflexive into non-reflexive

Table 21 .
Nonce words with clear meaning out of context

Table 23 .
Nonce words understood only in context

Table 25 .
Nonce words derived from Shakespeare

Table 26 .
Nonce words derived from literary characters