Wimp

How do native speakers come to acquire new vocabulary?

I attended a lecture given by Jean Aitchison at a conference in

Prague in September 1998 in which she described her research into native speaker vocabulary acquisition and used the word WIMP as her example, since it is a word that is now in common currency, but only recently. Her question was, how do native speakers come to acquire new vocabulary? Her answer was that it is encountered often enough in contexts that generally provided enough lexical support both inclusive (with synonyms and explanatory phrases- elaborations?) and exclusive (antonyms and phrases saying what a Wimp was not). It also appeared in structures that are mostly used for expressing derogatory attitudes, e.g. Oh, he's such a _____! With the supporting phonological manifestations.

From the Mail online, there is an article, Mothers are raising a generation of wimps By Sonia Poulton. Last updated at 00:35 05 July 2007.

The New Model Corpus records the word wimp 213 times, 172 of which are tagged as nouns. In the first screen shot here, we see the phrase such a wimp.

In the second screen shot, total wimp.

The British National Corpus records the word 101 times, 91 of which are tagged as nouns. Such a tiny amount of data for Jean Aitchison to work with suggests she had to look further afield than this corpus. The NMC did not exist at the time of her research into this word.