[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.Traballo fin de grao (UDC.FIL). Inglés: estudios lingüísticos y literarios. Curso 2022/202
