| As the living fossil of recording the development of social and history, language reflects every social changes and significant events. Semantic generalization is one way of language evolution. While catchwords being as an important part of modern Chinese vocabulary is the most active symbols recording of every big events in each times with the characteristics of semantic generalization. Based on the social linguistics theory and combined with the cognitive linguistics theory and semantics theory, this paper summarizes and analyzes catchwords’ appellations and industry words which take on the semantic generalization. It also discusses the intrinsic mechanism of catchwords’ semantic generalization phenomenon and its necessary consequence.Based on the precious research work, the paper redefines catchwords and semantic generalization. At the same time, it also teases appellations and industry words which take on the semantic generalization and both of them belong to the catchwords raged since reform and open. Adopting the method of combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, it studies the catchwords with the phenomenon of semantic generalization from the diachronic perspective and do some comparisons of three dictionaries and the present catchwords with semantic generalization. And then it statistics the new words come from the catchwords’ semantic generalization and summarizes the distribution of the semantic generalization of catchwords. Then it generalizes these two kinds of catchwords’characteristics and induces the deep reason of their different destinies. In addition, the paper also analyses the operating mechanism of the catchwords’ semantic generalization and its reasons of emerging and its result.To sum up, by the means of studying the semantic generalization of catchwords, it offers a new perspective and provides a broader space for Chinese acceptation’s development. Therefore, the catchwords semantic generalization research has a certain linguistic value. |
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