A Cognitive Semantic Approach To Conversion Of Chinese Net Words

The invention of the Internet was one of the greatest events in the history of human science and technology in the late20th century. Along with the wide use of the Internet, it is no longer a technical salon for the experts but a platform for people to share messages and communicate at any time without considering the limitation of time and space. Thus Human beings have started a fire-new era—the Internet Era. The influence of the Internet has stepped into our social life in many aspects, such as politics, economy, culture, education, etc. Meanwhile, the development of society is the catalyst of language evolution and the foundation of producing new words. Along with the Internet revolution, a language revolution has arisen and Netspeak, as a new language variety of our society, is the creation of this revolution.Conversion in language research has always been one of the hot topics. Conversion of Net words is an interesting and living language phenomenon which turns out to be popular with Netspeak, but this phenomenon is almost a new field up to now. So it leaves us some space for further discussion. The present thesis, from a perspective of cognitive linguistics, employs a qualitative and quantitative method and applies prototype theory, conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual metonymy theory to analyze conversion of Chinese Net words and its cognitive semantic mechanisms.The present study shows that conversion of Net words is the result of people’s dynamic categorization. Noun-verb conversion and noun-adjective conversion are two basic types of Chinese Net words conversion considering the frequency of occurrence and also these two are the most productive ones. Other types, such as adjective-verb conversion, adjective-adverb conversion can be occasionally found in Chinese Netspeak. Conversion of Chinese Net words has some distinctive features. In this thesis, we have expounded four major ones:prototype effect, economy, novelty and convergence. In our study of cognitive mechanism, we found that metonymy is the most important mechanism of conversion and it plays a key role in conversion of Net words, because in essence, conversion of Net words involves the conversion of two contiguous concepts and in form it is the substitution of one word class category for another. In addition to the cognitive mechanism of conceptual metonymy in the conversion of Net words, that of conceptual metaphor also plays a role. In the process of conversion, the meaning of Net words can be extended through association, inference and meaning projection. As a result, some conversions are produced under the interaction of metonymy and metaphor.All in all, through the study of conversion of Chinese Net words, the present thesis further reveals some regularities of human cognitive development, helps us to get familiar with the change and development of language and our society and do a better job in our future study and research of our language.