The Motivations Of Neologisms In The American Situation Comedy How I Met Your Mother

In the world of languages, new words are emerging every day to express new ideas, concepts and emotions. In particular, situation comedies experiment with the delicacy of our words and expressions and not a few inventive and hilarious neologisms have been created. The paper first reviews related theories on neologism and motivation, selecting a frame of classification, then examines the creative and eccentric words and expressions from the American situation comedy How I Met Your Mother, and some from Friends for further justification. Finally, a conclusion is drawn from the mostly qualitative analysis. Hopefully the paper may inspire attention to internal motivation of new words formation and have implications for vocabulary learning and teaching.