Migration of the term "neologism" between two scientific disciplines : neologism in linguistics and medicine

Abstract

The term neologism was formed in linguistics a few centuries before it was given the definition we use today. During the evolution of the term in linguistics, another discipline, medicine, adopted the concept and thus began to use it to refer to words created by patients in the advanced stages of a particular neurodegenerative disease (schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, etc.). The article examines when and how the term passed from one discipline to another and seeks to find out why medicine uses this particular term.

Keywords

• neologism
• lexicology
• medical discourse
• psychiatry
• semantic differentiation
• language disorders