A Model of Attitudinal Reasons for Neologism Use

How do speakers think and feel about neologisms? And how do these thoughts and feelings affect speakers’ desire to use a neologism? In the present work, we synthesized existing literature on speakers’ intrapersonal reasons for neologism use. From this synthesis, we derived a model of speaker attitudes about neologisms consisting of three core factors – efficiency, extravagance, and extralinguistic relevance. In three studies, we then empirically assessed whether this model accurately reflected how speakers thought and felt about neologisms, as well as how these thoughts and feelings affected whether speakers wanted to use a neologism. Results indicated that our conceptual model reasonably captured the various types of feelings people have about neologisms and confirmed that each of these types of feelings can be relevant to neologism use.