A Cognitive Study Of Old Chinese Words With New Meanings

With the development and popularization of the Internet, the application of old Chinese words with new meanings has become a tendency and fashion in netizens’communication. Many scholars put old words with new meanings into the scope of neologism. Therefore, in recent years, the study of neologism has become one of the hottest topics in the field of linguistics, and has achieved fruitful results. On the one hand, most scholars take neologism with new forms and new meanings at the same time as their research object. However, for those words, which still keep the original forms with new meanings are rarely discussed. Even though there are some books on the phenomenon of old Chinese words with new meanings, they tend to explore the causes, the approaches, the types and the ways of change in old words with new meanings from traditional aspects such as sociology, culture and dictionary compiling. Research of old words with new meanings from the perspective of cognitive linguistics is badly needed. On the other hand, for old Chinese words jiong(囧) and mei(槑), most scholars analyze them from the perspectives of iconicity, language memes, sociolinguistics and cognitive pragmatics. Hence, there is a wanting job for the analysis of the semantic shift, meaning construction and mechanism of meaning construction from a cognitive semantics approach.In the thesis, we use Conceptual Metaphor and Conceptual Blending Theories in cognitive semantics, to discuss some basic regularities of old Chinese words with new meanings, the dynamic online meaning construction of old words with new meanings and their cognitive mechanisms with synchronic and diachronic methods and inductive and deductive methods.Semantically, the meaning construction of old Chinese words with new meanings is a cognitive process, through which the old Chinese words with new meanings are understood by netizens in network contexts. In the platform of network context, netizens actively seek cognitive similarities between network communication environment and the real-life world. What’s more, netizens also creatively carry out the cognitive similarities from the real-life world to network context by mapping or selective projection. Therefore, some old Chinese words with new meanings come into being from network communication. In the thesis, we focus on describing the development and change of meaning and the semantic evolution of jiong(囧) and mei(槑), then we find three basic regularities, that is, economy in word form, generalization in word meaning and context-dependence in both word form and word meaning; through analyzing the dynamic online process of meaning construction of jiong(炯) and mei(槑), we find that there exist two cognitive mechanisms in their meaning construction, and they are conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending.All in all, through analyzing some old Chinese words, such as jiong(囧) and mei(槑), we get to know that some forms or shapes, meanings and their cultural connotation of old Chinese words are closely related to our real-life world. So, to have a good understanding of the development and evolution of old Chinese words are of great help to improve our daily communication, in particular our Internet communication. At the same time, we can know that these old Chinese words own some functions, which reflect the developing and changing society, culture and human being’s psychological features in information times.