ARCHIVED 2.5.4. Term Creation

 

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Terms may be created by assigning new meanings to existing terms or by combining and deleting lexical elements (DUBUC 1997: 131-141). In either case, certain principles should be respected to improve the chances that new terms will be accepted.

Semantic Change Rules

Sense neologisms do not involve any change to the form of the term. Instead, they result from:

• expansion: extending the meaning of a term by giving it a new meaning, as in a shift from the concrete to the abstract or from the abstract to the concrete (e.g. atom - in Canada, a level of childrens’ sport for 9-11 year olds)
• metaphor: giving a new meaning by analogy to that of an established term (e.g. backbone of a network)
• metonymy: taking the part for the whole (e.g. chair, for chairman), or the whole for the part (e.g. A1+, designating a person of the blood type A1 positive, or a flask containing a sample of that blood group)
• eponymy: widening the use of a proper name as a common noun (e.g. watt from James Watt, the Scottish inventor of the unit of electrical power)
• conversion of grammatical category (e.g. preliminary, converted from adjective to noun)
• borrowing from another subject field: adopting a term already established elsewhere with a slight change in meaning such as from animate to inanimate (e.g. virus, worm and other virology terms adopted in the field of computer security)

Morphological Change Rules

Form neologisms (that is, new lexical items) are created through a variety of processes, including:

• derivation: by adding grammatical prefixes or suffixes to established terms (e.g. digital – digitize, digitization)
• composition: by joining bound and free forms in single words (e.g. cyberspace, nonbiodegradable, overtime)
• compounding: by joining two or more words in phrasal compounds (e.g. database management system, broadcast, Webcast)
• blending: by clipping and joining parts of multiple words in a single word (e.g. e-mail - from electronic mail, simulcast - from simultaneous broadcast, blogging - from Web and logging)
• acronymy and initialization: by joining certain syllables or letters from compounds (e.g. AIDS, CD-ROM)
• borrowing: adopting a word from another language (e.g. Triticum, turgidum, durum)

The acceptance of neologisms depends on such factors as their brevity (e.g. e-mail for electronic mail), their mnemonics (e.g. applet for little application) and their potential for derivation or productivity (e.g. e-mail, e-mails, e-mailing, e-mailed). But the most important factor in the acceptance of neologisms is their motivation: the term should reflect the characteristics of the concept it designates. Its lexical components should provide an idea of the concept itself. For instance, software library is easily understood as a collection of computer programs.

The reason for creating the neologism may be stylistic (e.g. visually-impaired, for blind), technological (e.g. intelligent personal assistant, for the new palm-held computer connected to the Internet), social (e.g. chairperson, for a gender-neutral position title), or functional, so called because a new way of designating the concept is dictated by the situation in which communication is needed (e.g. palm, from the trademark Palm, for the palm-held computer connected to the Internet).