The Study Of Familization Neologisms Based On Prototypical Category Theory

With the popularity of familization neologisms, such as裸婚(people who get marriedwithout a house, a car, even a wedding ceremony),裸降(price falls barely without bundlesales),裸捐(all-out donation),裸退(complete retirement),裸官(public officials withspouses and children living abroad not for work),裸车(cars without fixing anynonstandard fittings),月光族(people who spend all salary every month),蚁族(ant tribe),啃老族(NEET clan),光盘族(people who eat all the food on the plate for saving resources),弃炮族(people who abandon setting firecracker for reducing pollution),彩虹族(rainbowclan),恐�'族(people who have home phobia) and etc, a new kind of languagephenomenon is thriving with life and becomes the study focus of more and more linguistsand scholars and their studies involve fields of lexicon, semantics and pragmatics.Different from the previous studies, this thesis presents a detailed analysis of the linguisticphenomenon of familization neologisms from the perspective of prototypical categorytheory. Based on the previous researches, the author makes a thorough investigation aboutnewly emerging family words under cognitive perspective with two kinds of family wordsluo X and X zu, which are collected from China Daily, newspapers and the Internet.With the features of fast emergence, mass production and a certain rationale offormation, familization neologism has become a remarkable linguistic phenomenon amongthe endlessly emerging tide of new words. Thus a reasonable explanation of its generationhas been an urgent task in linguistic circle.The previous studies have shown that familization neologism is a language phenomenonwhich has obviously generative features and the common morpheme it contains has stronggenerative capability, gradually stable position, analogical generation and distinct semanticfeatures. Linguistic analogical mechanism and economical mechanism play a significantrole in its generation and development. Meanwhile, it’s also affected by the social reality,mass culture and phycology.Categories and categorization are of great importance for humans to comprehend theworld for it endows the world with certain structures and make it easy for understanding.The great contrasts between classical category theory and prototypical category theory arealso presented. The most obvious features of prototypical category theory like familyresemblance, degree of membership, fuzzy boundaries, are also stressed. Based on thidtheory, this thesis is intended to solve the problems like what the relationship between familization neologism and prototypical category theory is and how to make aclassification of the familization neologism under prototypical category theory, how thedata are collected and the feasibility of their utilization. this theory applied has somepeculiarities: high information density, stable structures and versatile flexibility, which arejust what have been shown in the process of word-familization. Therefore it’s clear that, inessence, the process of word-familization is just the operation of categorization and thefamilization neologisms are the products of familization. Meanwhile, a thorough analysisabout family words has also been given, especially focusing on the classification andgenerative mechanisms. The classification of familization neologism under prototypicalcategory theory can be divided into three parts: the prototype words, sub-prototype wordsand a-typical words. And their generation is mainly through three means: metaphor,metonymy and analogy. Despite its limitations, this study can provide some clues for thecomprehension and further research of familization neologism.