Editing Onomasiology (section)

===Explanations===

When a speaker has to name something, they first try to categorize it. If the speaker can classify the referent as member of a familiar concept, they 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. [[euphemism|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
* wordplay/puns
* 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.