ABSTRACT
This chapter extends the focus to the level (or layer) of naming & framing referred to as Level 2 in this book, i.e. the circumstance that the lexical expression-unit chosen for naming something may give the recipient a certain hint about what it is supposed to mean by virtue of its composition and/or origin. Following an earlier account, this perspective is also termed the Joyce principle and taken further in the light of existing debates on the nature and implications of lexical non-arbitrariness, also labelled lexical motivation. Relying on real-life examples from a selection of communicative domains, the chapter addresses the apparent paradox that in some cases this built-in “literal” meaning of a name has no bearing on people’s understanding of its conventionalized meaning whatsoever, while in others it may either support or directly undermine the wordmaker’s original intentions. New leads to explaining the mechanism in play are identified by considering results gained in experimental research on people’s real-time processing of familiar versus novel compound words and other non-arbitrary names, both in isolation and under influence of multimodal contextual cues. On this background, some implications for existing attempts to pinpoint what makes “a good name” are critically discussed.
