A Comparative Study On English And Chinese Neologisms From The Perspective Of Cognitive Sociolinguistics

In recent years, Cognitive Linguistics has been making rapid progress. To study oflanguage per se has not long been the interest of many scholars. Instead, a growing numberof scholars turn to focus on the social aspects of language and to study language variation,which promotes the social turn of Cognitive Linguistics. Neologism, the most sensitivepart in language, is a weather vane of social changes. Neologisms refer to the new words orold words with new meanings to present new phenomena, new concepts, and newinventions in daily communication. Since the1980s, the world has witnessed dramaticscientific progress at an ever-increasing speed at such an information age. Meanwhile,amazing changes in politics, economy, and other fields in everyday life have been broughtabout by China’s series of political and economic reforms. Therefore, English and Chineseneologisms are emerging endlessly, and the study of neologisms from the social dimensionarouses increasing attention.This thesis conducts a comparative study on English and Chinese neologisms withinthe framework of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Dirk Geeraerts proposes a prototype-basedsociosemantic model and puts forward the three sociosemantic forces in his2008article“Prototypes, Stereotypes, and Semantic Norms”, namely, semantics of cooperation,semantics of authority, and semantics of conflict and competition. With the purpose ofmaking a contrastive analysis, this thesis collects all the108English neologisms posted onthe famous website for neologisms Word Spy (www.wordspy.com) in2012and all the305Chinese neologisms in the book Chinese Neologisms in2012(《2012汉语新词语》) as thedata to be analyzed. This thesis adopts prototype theory and Dirk Geeraerts’ sociosemanticmodel as the theoretical framework so as to explore how the three sociosemantic forcesplay a role in the interpretation of English and Chinese neologisms. The present thesis hascome to the following major findings:1) The three sociosemantic forces work differently in the conceptualization ofneologisms: the semantics of cooperation plays the most significant role, followed by the semantics of authority, while the semantics of conflict and competition makes littlecontribution.2) Meanwhile, all the108English neologisms and305Chinese neologisms areclassified into7categories according to subject areas. In the subject area of computers,culture and lifestyle, and people and society, the semantics of cooperation helps a lot in theconceptualization of both English and Chinese neologisms. In the subject area of business,and science and technology, the semantics of authority outweighs the other two forces inthe interpretation of both English and Chinese neologisms. However, in the subject area ofpolitics, the interpretation of English neologisms depends overwhelmingly on thesemantics of cooperation while the understanding of Chinese neologisms takes a fifty-fiftystand on the semantics of cooperation and the semantics of authority. Also, in the subjectareas of health and environment, English neologisms can be best understood from thesemantics of authority while Chinese neologisms turn to the semantics of cooperation forhelp.The current comparative study finds out the similarities and differences of the threesociosemantic forces in the interpretation of English and Chinese neologisms. The researchhas the implications of deepening people’s understanding of neologisms, providingexamples for the study of language variation, shedding new light on the exploration ofCognitive Sociolinguistics, facilitating English and Chinese learning, and makingcontributions to the compilation of dictionaries.