Motivation in Language: the case of Metonymically Motivated Innovative nouns in Children's Speech

The aim of this paper is to provide partial evidence that a great many neologisms in children's speech are metonymically motivated. For our purposes we shall rely basically on the language corpus gathered in the course of longitudinal studies carried out during the years 2000-2002, concentrating on innovative nouns formed by English-speaking and Polish children. Apart from this, we will provide selected examples of lexical innovations drawn from Eve V. Clark's language data (Clark 1993). However, before the discussion commences, let us briefly outline the issue of motivation in language in order to provide a