A Study Of Representations Of IN-Formal Unit Concepts In Baike.com

In recent years, Chinese catchphrases on the Internet and neologisms have emerged vastly, which had enriched the Chinese vocabulary system. Their abnormal expressions have also drawn many language researchers' attention. IN-formal units, which are released daily by China Mobile, together with Baike.com, are neologisms created by the website. Although the representation of the IN-formal unit concepts are rather complicated, there is a small amount of relevant researches and few scholars use Formal Unit Concept Frame Theory to conduct relative studies.This thesis employs Formal Unit Concept Frame Theory, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Metonymy Theory as its theoretical foundations so as to study the IN-formal units collected from Baike.com. It applies methods such as the literature review method and induction to probe into the process of how concepts carried by IN-formal units are represented by IN-formal units and its cognitive motivation.We attempt to answer three questions in this paper:(1) What classes can the IN-formal unit concepts be divided into?(2) How are the conceptual structures of the IN-formal unit thing concepts represented as their linguistic structures?(3) How are the conceptual structures of the IN-formal unit event concepts represented as their linguistic structures?Through analysis, we find out that (1) IN-formal unit concepts can be divided into IN-formal unit thing concepts and IN-formal unit event concepts; (2) in terms of the representation of concepts, the structures of IN-formal units are mainly the result of the principle of economy and they can manifest clearly which elements are profiled. Also, frames described in figures present the process of the representation. The representation of the conceptual structure is always based on the profiling and hiding of elements within the superordinate frames and the subordinate ones. Furthermore, there are four laws concerning the representation:1)a particular IN-formal unit often activate a particular frame, but only some elements within the frame are profiled and the others are hidden; 2)the profiling and hiding is governed together by the principle of iconicity and the principle of economy; 3) the representation of IN-formal unit concepts is on the basis of conceptual metaphor and (or) conceptual metonymy, and in terms of quantity, there are more metonymies than metaphors; 4) there are more action-event concepts and thing concepts containing action-event than other kinds of IN-formal unit concepts.This paper takes Chinese as its research objective and illustrates the representation of IN-formal unit concepts by using Formal Unit Concept Frame Theory, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Metonymy Theory. Therefore, on one hand, this paper can examine the explanatory power and persuasion of these theories. On the other, it can make certain contributions to the study of Chinese.