Excerpt from Studies in the Psychology of Language

The speaker-hearer relation is fundamentally like any relation between persons, both parties acting as impelled by the nature of their genes and the history of their experiences. Mental connections or tendencies are established and strengthened in both by occurrence and consequences, repetition and reward. The relation is distinguished from others by the fact that the speaker uses words (usually in patterns) and that the influence of these upon the hearer depends largely upon the meanings which the words and the patterns have for him. The speaker's purpose is to produce certain behavior in the hearer which may be action or emotion as well as comprehension or thought. One saying "Come here." "What time is it, please?" and "I will give you a dollar." may care little what the hearer thinks, provided he comes, states the time, and feels pleased or satisfied. But comprehension is usually involved. In the speaker-hearer relation the speaker leads, and almost all linguistic inventions are made by him. His variations from the customary words and patterns are limited, however, by their effects upon the hearers, since he will continue and perpetuate only such as get satisfactory responses from them. This interplay of speaker and hearer (and, in modern times, writer and reader) accounts for linguistic changes.

This monograph reports facts (A) concerning changes in meaning which a word undergoes when its grammatical function changes, as from substantive to verb, verb to substantive, adjective to verb, etc., (B) concerning the origination, interpretation and perpetuation of compound words, and (C) concerning the relation of the length of words to the frequency of their use.

Its general conclusions are that the variations originating in the speaker work mainly toward abbreviation, but also toward variety, that the comprehension of a new locution is usually dependent on the real situation, or verbal context, or both, in which the hearer hears it, that the linguistic patterns which origination more or less follows are so multifarious that they give little aid to comprehension.

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