Metapragmatic neology in digital discourse: Solid groundwork for Morphopragmatics and Construction Morphology

This note addresses the topic of Judith Bridges’s focus article, namely -splain neologisms such as mansplain, thinsplain and covidsplain, from the perspective of morphological theory. I attempt to show that Morphopragmatics, a subfield of morphology, can account for the complex pragmatics of word formation processes like those in -splain neology. I propose that the analysis of -splain words as constructional idioms, under the framework of Construction Morphology, provides a suitable account of the pragmatic effects associated with the innovations in this lexical pattern