Grafting Neologisms

Lexical Neologisms in Japanese

The practically universal promotion of internationalisation and globalisation, coupled with the technological and scientific advances of the preceding decades, has provided a fertile ground for accelerated absorption of lexical neologisms reflecting the rapid changes in the social and material cultures of the different speech communities of the world. However, despite the universality of the la...

Neologisms, Nonces and Word Formation

Neologism dictionaries celebrate the influence of science and technology on language – how scientists and technologists add to the stock of words, and occasionally, add new grammatical structures. There are two claims made in the literature on neologisms: First, that borrowings, from classical languages and ‘prestige’ languages are widespread in the science and technology literature. Second tha...

Cheap Talk, Neologisms, and Bargaining

This paper shows that in some bargaining games, cheap talk must matter: the unique neologism-proof equilibrium involves informative talk. A simple tradeoff makes both equilibrium talk and neologisms credible: by saying that he is interested in trading, the buyer encourages the seller to continue to bargain but receives poorer terms of trade if trade occurs. All tj^pes of both parties are (weakl...

Credible Neologisms in Games of Communication

Word Learning in Context - Metaphors and Neologisms

We describe two experiments related to learning new words in context. We study two types of new words: metaphors (for whom a related meaning already exists) and artiicial words. The new words were used anaphorically to refer to past objects in the text. For anaphoric metaphors, subjects showed an initial bias to adopt a literal interpretation, which shifted as the experiment progressed. Subject...