Word-formation from the names of United States presidents

Abstract

[Abstracts] This paper collects and analyzes the words formed from the names of American presidents, from Washingtonite to Bidenian. The following objectives are set: to find out which formative elements are the most productive in our field of study, to determine the meaning of the neologisms they form and to identify which presidents’ names have served as a morphological base for the creation of a greater number of words, as well as the most frequent ones. Prior to our study, a theoretical background is set out in which the work is contextualized within word-formation in general and deonomastics in particular, a subdiscipline that examines the formation of words from proper nouns. The method followed is a corpus-based study using two sources: the American English Google Books corpus, which was employed to search for words from the end of the 18th century until 2009, and the NOW corpus, which was utilized to seek words appearing from 2010 onwards. Neologisms have been searched using the wildcard tool by inserting an asterisk before or after the names of each president. Once all the words were collected, they were classified according to the word-formation mechanism involved in their creation. It is found that most words formed from the names of American presidents are derived by suffixation, so the analysis is concentrated on words formed by each of the most productive suffixes. In our object of study, these are -esque, -ian, -ite, -ism and -iana. To meet the objectives, the analysis has been divided into two parts. Foremost, a quantitative and diachronic study of the words formed by each of the suffixes is conducted; then, a semantic study is undertaken. The following conclusions have been reached for each suffix. First, the suffix -esque forms adjectival derivatives whose most frequent meaning is ‘resembling X’, and is applied to names of American presidents from the late 19th century to the present. Second, the suffixes -ian and -ite are studied together, as they both form derivatives that function either as adjectives or as nouns; -ian tends to form adjectival derivatives of relational meaning, while -ite usually forms nouns meaning ‘follower or supporter of’, although both suffixes may adopt the characteristics of the other. They are applied from the earliest presidents to the present day; in particular, -ian is the one which derives the types with the highest number of tokens of all suffixes. Third, -ism and -iana form nominal derivatives. On the one hand, words with -ism tend to signify ‘political doctrine of X’, but when attached to -ian the semantic modulation is ‘political doctrine inspired by X’. This suffix is also applied since the beginning of the 19th century and is the one that derives the largest number of types of all suffixes. Finally, the suffix -iana forms derivatives whose meaning is ‘the collected sayings, wisdom or artifacts connected with X’; it is applied since the first rulers as well. The presidents whose names are most productive in word-formation are Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.