Exploring an environmental neologism in Norwegian across corpora

Environmental neologisms demonstrate the influence that political debates have in generating new words. In this article, we account for the case of det grønne skiftet (‘the green shift’) which has shown greatly increasing frequency over the last few years. While frequency as a criterion was already used in past studies, we propose to use the spread of an expression across domains as a criterion for neologicity. Analyses based on corpus data are more reliable than approaches based on dictionaries or on native speakers’ intuition.
The article presents a case study relying on public sources as well as the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus, now searchable via CLARINO, the Norwegian contribution to CLARIN, a European project for language tools and resources.