Verbing the Unverbable: A Pragma-Cognitive Analysis of Creative Verb Formations in New Media Discourse
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: “The food is not fooding” sounds, at first hearing, like an error. It is instead an instance of a productive and largely unexamined new-media construction in which a noun is converted into a verb and placed beside its own source, so that the clause asks whether the noun is living up to its own name. This study terms the construction sarcastic verbing and analyses it through an integrated framework combining conversion theory, Construction Grammar and cyberpragmatics, informed by the echoic account of irony. Sixty-one candidate instances from Facebook, X and TikTok (November 2025–August 2026) were coded independently by two coders on a three-tier instrument recording derivational route and lexical status, entrenchment and frame type, and pragmatic function and polarity; the thirty-two instances coded identically by both were retained for analysis. Zero-derivation accounts for 29 of the 32 items, and entrenchment spans the full cline from frame-bound coinage to fully lexicalised verbs, indicating a construction caught at several stages of conventionalisation at once. Within the frame-bearing subset (n = 20), negated instances consistently performed mock-complaint and affirmed instances performed praise or social commentary. Because several of the clearest ironic instances involve ordinary verbs with no lexical novelty, the study argues that the construction’s evaluative force resides in the echoic frame rather than in individual coinages.
Institutions: Rivers State University, University of Port Harcourt
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7225457135