Néologie et dictionnaires d’usage : la codification sémantique

It is well known that the concept of the neologism is difficult to define and that the frontiers of what can and what cannot be considered as a neologism are fuzzy. Despite this general observation, it is often claimed in the literature that a neologism is characterized by the absence of or the quest for conventionality. If this is true, we cannot blame dictionaries for being careful about which neologism out of many others is to be lemmatized. Taking these facts into consideration, we wish to demonstrate in this article that what dictionaries do is wait for a neologism to cease to be one, i.e. to acquire semantic and referential stability which is, in fine, what the processes of denomination do.