Formation of Neologisms in Modern Greek Language: Productivity of Suffixila

This paper deals with the suffixal word formation of abstract nouns, so called neologisms that have not yet been fixed in dictionaries of the Modern Greek language. The neologisms are formed by using the suffix -ίλα, which is very productive and participates in the formation of a number of nouns denoting smell, various human states, etc. This research is based on the analysis of corpora of Modern Greek texts and is relevant, while it was possible to find and fix various neologisms used in both written and oral speech by native Greek speakers. As we show in our research, after different processes of socialization and lexicalization, a neologism can functionally become involved in the language or remain as an occasionalism appearing in separate cases or categories of texts, while the axiological potentiality of fixed derivatives depends on the original word-basis, i.e. various parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, numerals), as well as abbreviations and whole phrases. We show that the original base can be displayed in Latin letters in some cases, the fact which indicates the presence of such a phenomenon as translanguaging, very characteristic and productive process for the Modern Greek language. The article also demonstrates the potentiality of the fixed lexemes from point of view of the creation of secondary derivatives.