Dear Wolfgang,
I would expect that some neologisms in Japanese are formed via morphology
(expressed in hiragana?), and some as novel compounds of kanji. For example,
I once asked a Chinese person how they expressed the word "laser", and they
said they used the kanji for "powerful light". I believe they use katakana
for "laser" in Japanese. Sometimes neologisms are expressed as morphological
variants, such as using "intended" to mean "fiance'". I expect it would be
relatively easy to identify neologisms in katakana, but much more difficult
for kanji. I know that John Algeo has done work on neologisms for English
(see "Where do All the New Words Come From?", John Algeo, American Speech,
Vol. 55, pp. 264-277, 1980). There is also a special issue of the journal
Dictionaries (Vol. 16, 1995) that was devoted to neologisms.
Bob
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