Shaping the nature and environment domains through lexical innovation in Official Norwegian Reports

Abstract

Official Norwegian Reports (NOUs) is a series of expert reports that provide a basis for political decisions and deliberation, and which has been central to the Norwegian political landscape since the 1970s. Previous research has shown that this genre has been important for disseminating expert knowledge into the political sphere and to some extent also to the general public, and that it is an important source of neologisms in a number of societal areas. We analyse neology and term formation in the NOU reports, and we examine the spread of terms from the NOU reports into the wider public sphere, using the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus (NNC) for comparison. The article argues that lexical innovation is a central characteristic of the NOU as a genre, and a decisive factor in the NOU's contribution to framing political issues and providing solutions to political problems, as well as to the dissemination of expert knowledge to the public.