Explanations of Lexical Change
When a speaker has to name something, s/he first tries to categorize it. If the speaker can classify the referent as member of a familiar concept, s/he will carry out some sort of cognitive-linguistic cost-benefit-analysis: what should I say to get what I want. Based on this analysis, the speaker can then either fall back on an already existing word or decide to coin a new designation. These processes are sometimes more conscious, sometimes less conscious.
The coinage of a new designation can be incited by various forces (cf. Grzega 2004):
- difficulties in classifying the thing to be named or attributing the right word to the thing to be named, thus confusing designations
- fuzzy difference between superordinate and subordinate term due to the monopoly of the prototypical member of a category in the real world
- everyday contact situations
- institutionalized and non-institutionalized linguistic pre- and proscriptivism
- flattery
- insult
- disguising things (i.e. euphemistic language, doublespeak)
- taboo
- avoidance of words that are phonetically similar or identical to negatively associated words
- abolition of forms that can be ambiguous in many contexts
- word play/punning
- excessive length of words
- morphological misinterpretation (creation of transparency by changes within a word = folk-etymology)
- deletion of irregularity
- desire for plastic/illustrative/telling names for a thing
- natural prominence of a concept
- cultural-induced prominence of a concept
- changes in the world
- changes in the categorization of the world
- prestige/fashion (based on the prestige of another language or variety, of certain word-formation patterns, or of certain semasiological centers of expansion)
The following alleged motives found in many works have been claimed (with corresponding argumentation) to be invalid by Grzega (2004): decrease in salience, reading errors, laziness, excessive phonetic shortness, difficult sound combinations, unclear stress patterns, cacophony.
Read more about this topic: Onomasiology
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