Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Natural language expresses new concepts by reusing existing words or coining new ones. Previous studies have examined these word formation strategies separately through a functional lens, but it is unclear why one strategy might be preferred over another. In this study, we hypothesize that communicative and cognitive efficiency might predict the choice between lexical reuse and compounding for expressing an emerging concept. We test our hypothesis by developing a computational analysis of English word meanings that emerged over the past century. Our results suggest that strategy choice may be explained partly by a pressure for least effort. Our work contributes a novel connection between strategy choice in word formation and functional theories of language.