The system of literary neologisms as the text-forming category in Douglas Coupland’s novel “Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture”

In the current paper, the textual functionality of the system of Douglas Coupland’s literary neologisms is analyzed from the meaning-construction and communicative-pragmatic perspectives. The artistic significance of neologisms is considered in terms of the realization in the novel of such a conceptual metatrope as the principle of “death of concepts”. The paper also focuses on describing the fundamentals of classification of Coupland’s neologisms into lexico-semantic groups and word-formation types. The features of lexical, semantic and phraseological neologisms presented in the novel “Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture” are described. The creative potential of literary neologisms is studied from the perspective of the reader relying on conceptual blending in meaning construction. It is shown that the thematic development of Douglas Copeland’s novel is determined by the use of complex semantic units consisting of neologisms and their author’s definitions. The reader’s construction of meaning of such semantic units requires, among other things, reliance on the intra-word (word-forming) context, on the macro-context of the novel, and on inferential knowledge drawn from a wider background context. Subjectivity in the reception of neologisms is determined by the development of personal meanings in the process of reading a literary text.