Investigating Neologisms in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter

Abstract

J.K. Rowling’s style of writing had a great impact not only on literature, but also on several areas of research. The present research work aims at investigating neologisms found in Rowling’s Harry Potter series from a stylistic viewpoint. This study is conducted based on the morphological word-formation theory suggested by W.N. Francis to examine the processes used by the author in creating new lexical units. The corpus of the study consists of 22 neologisms extracted from four books of the saga through reading and note-taking. Therefore, each neologism was examined and classified under the process that corresponds to its characteristics. Results and findings of this course of thought showed that J.K. Rowling used two processes more often than other ones. These processes are Borrowing and Compounding, for that half the data was attributed to them.