La Creativitat lèxica de Josep Maria de Sagarra : el cas de La Divina Comèdia

This paper studies the neologisms coined by Josep Maria de Sagarra in his
translation of Dantes Divine Comedy, published between 1947 and 1951.
The article combs through La Divina Comèdia translated by Sagarra and lists
the words (a total of 113) that cannot be found in the leading dictionaries of
the Catalan language. Out of the 113 words that do not appear in the dictionaries,
it is argued that 96 are neologisms coined by Sagarra in his translation. The remaining words are either orthographic variants or words that have
been previously used by other writers, even though they do not appear in the
dictionaries. The article classifies Sagarras neologisms according to the processes
of word formation, basically composition and derivation. Within derivation
one device Segarra often used is suffixation, a process for which a detailed
typology is given by categorising the phenomena into different
subgroups. The article also quantifies the frequency with which each of the
mechanisms to create neologisms was used. The conclusions posit two possible
reasons for Sagarras lexical creativity.