A Study On Australian Convict Words In The Colonial Era From A Social Cognitive Perspective

Linguists believe that Australia is a natural language laboratory(Fritz,2007).When the British established a colony in Australia,they sent a large number of prisoners from all over the UK.Although these immigrants speak English,their geographical or social dialects vary widely.In a new social environment,prisoners have experienced a common life,constantly transforming their own hometown,class,and group internal conceptual structures to a unique prison slang using a certain social cognitive mechanism and gradually achieving inter-subjectivity.As these usages continues to spread,convict words become an integral part of the Australian standard language.The existing research on cognitive lexical semantics seldom focus on the study of language variation,while cognitive linguistics is undergoing a social turn,emphasizing the socialization of meaning.The new changes in cognitive linguistics can just make up for this gap in cognitive lexical semantics.This research is based on the social cognitive linguistics theory,to illustrates how the sociolect in the British convict community is gradually become a part of standard Australian convict words.The purpose of this study is to study the social cognitive mechanism of convict words formation in Australian English using qualitative analysis in combination with a collection of 15 specific Australian convict words.The corpus of this research is mainly selected from the monograph Australian English vocabulary(Yao,2009).In this research,there are two types of convict words.One is the police type,the other is the convict type.First,to verify the correctness of semantic and pragmatic of these words in self-build corpora,our research searched the prisoner’s vocabulary in the book by using mainstream Australian dictionaries,monographs,and English etymological dictionaries.Through preliminary search,15 objects that meet our research are searched,and their meaning and etymology are marked accordingly.This research is to build a SMM+ model,to analysis the social cognitive process of the formation of Australian convict words.These words are all tested through three main process in this model.Our research believe that the formation of Australian prisoner’s vocabulary needs to be understood in both strong and low contexts.In a high context,the meaning of words directly corresponds to changes in external conditions,and most of the information is concentrated and internalized on convicts’ brains.In the process of forming the convict words in Australia,we mainly regard the prison environment as a high context,and the social cognition of individual prisoners will directly determine the meaning of language.In the high context,the concepts inherent in the prisoners’ minds are constantly affected by social factors in the external world,including: social characteristics such as actions,duties,religion,biology,objects,and the use of cognition ways,such as prominence,metaphor,and metonymy.When the individual prisoner uses these terms to communicate with other community members.They have achieved a preliminary confirmation of these convict words.And the inter-subjectivity is achieved,forming the basic semantics in a high context high context.However,the community language formation within the prison alone does not constitute the standard language that we use and look up in the dictionary today.When these group dialects circulate into society,a certain social motivation is needed.In the formation process of Australian prisoner vocabulary,there are also media communication,official document records,dictionary compilation and other methods.These circulation methods make Australian convict words in a low context environment.In such an atmosphere,the written language is formed,which is a clear coding and is preserved.Through the research in this thesis,we finally conducted a detailed analysis of 15 Australian convict words and explored its social cognitive mechanism.Our research found that,first of all,the process of prisoner vocabulary formation in Australian English mainly includes the three stages of ‘individual conception’ ‘social cognitive processing’ ‘media spreading’,thus,the conversion from individual language to collective language and even social standard language is realized.Secondly,the process of prisoner vocabulary formation is mainly affected by social factors such as action,responsibility,religion,physiology,and occupation factors.Cognitive ways such as metonymy,prominence,and metaphor also have an important impact on vocabulary formation.Finally,it is the dictionary compilation,official documentation and media spreading that have helped us achieve the Australian prisoner’s vocabulary formed into a standard language that is well known to the public today.