Neologisms and Knights at the Heart Festival: Analysis of Online Live-Stream Broadcasting Banter Between Fans and Action Heroes

Among Farzad Sharifian’s various research contributions, he established the understanding that everyday English terms denoting items such as fire and smoke had various meanings for Australians, depending on whether they were Aboriginal Australians or non-Aboriginal Australians (Sharifian 2010). The dynamic, emergent, and distributed aspects of cultural cognition and language are also areas of theorization that are amply supported by his data (Sharifian 2008). These findings inspired me to choose a set of emergent data from Spring 2020 to analyze in this volume dedicated to his life and work. It will describe the emergence of a polysemous wordplay I witnessed and participated in during a live-streaming video and simultaneous text chat in Japanese.