Mayakovsky’s Neologisms: Word-Formation Models, Functions, Afterlife

Abstract

The article focuses on three areas that have so far attracted only marginal attention from researchers. It looks at the unusual pattern of word-formation, based on metonymy, employed by Mayakovsky especially in the creation of new adjectives. The study then concentrates on Mayakovsky’s motivation for coining neologisms (beyond the usual need to find names for new objects and phenomena), focusing on those neologisms created by Mayakovsky in pursuance of rhyme. The study also examines the afterlife of Mayakovsky’s neologisms following their use in his works, to identify which of them made their way into current Russian. The three-level comparison of two authoritative works on Mayakovsky’s neologisms (Humesky, 1964 and Valavin, 2010) with data from the Russian National Corpus demonstrates the survival of several of Mayakovsky’s neologisms in ordinary Russian. The Corpus also reveals that some neologisms traditionally ascribed to Mayakovsky were in fact created by other authors and may have been only “borrowed” by Mayakovsky. The comparison of the works by Humesky and Valavin also revealed interesting facts about the evolution of the study of Mayakovsky’s neologisms.