Abstract

We present a correlational analysis in which we study the association between orthographic or typographical marks and the novelty of a term in a diachronic press corpus. Our question was if any pattern can be observed in the evolution of the percentage of times a new word is marked and if such percentage declines as the word undergoes a process of lexicalization. We studied a sample of 40 neologisms from the domain of economics used in 4 Spanish newspaper of wide circulation during the period 20 06-2016, which includes the onset of Spanish economic crisis. Results, obtained from 41,695 contexts of usage, indicate a tendency of the marks to descend with time. However, this tendency is not statistically significant. Moreover, not all types of neologims behave in the same way, as some are more prone to their assimilation than others.