Néologie et traitement automatique

First the traditional way of looking at neologisms is sketched out, involving in particular the narrow opposition made between neologisms of formand neologisms of meaning, the posited difference between neology and lexical innovation, creativity, the continuum between general language and specialised discourse, and problems of dating the first appearance. Then the three main functions of a lexical unit are presented in the framework of object classes : predicate, argument, actualizer. thought is then given to the levels of linguistic analysis and to the problem of the word, with the existence of polylexical units, which may constitute a third articulation of language. Neologisms are identified first by consulting reference dictionaries as an exclusion corpus to which various filters must be added. there are three main hurdles in identifying semantic neology : polysemy, set phrases and inference. examples are given with descriptions in intension and extension, and the tools developed by the Laboratoire Lexiques, Dictionnaires, Informatique are also presented, showing how the theoretical approach to neology has been renewed, and indicating some of the practical results.