The Doorbells Of The Mind

Language is in constant change. Being active and flexible, the lexicon develops more rapidly than any other aspects of language. As the cutting edge of language, neologisms connect synchronic and diachronic lexical studies, indicating the morphological and semantic features of words in a language and suggesting the regularity of lexical change. They encode people's new experience and new thought, mark the social and cultural attention and change people's concepts and ideas to accommodate the new world.Neologisms do offer a fascinating and challenging object of study in lexicology. This dissertation attempts to explore English neologisms from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Previous studies of English neologisms focus on the collection, classification and description of neologisms and always attribute the booming of neologisms to scientific innovation, social change, and internal development of English language. These studies have their own merits, whereas some questions still remain unanswered. Neologisms are the conceptual representation of people's new experience rather than the mirroring of the external reality. How do neologisms reflect the way people conceptualize and categorize their new experience? What are the characteristics of their meaning? What kind of cognitive mechanisms are involved in the creation and meaning construction of neologisms? This study aims to provide tentative answers to these questions.Neologisms do not come out of thin air. They are deeply rooted in our experience and perception of the physical, social and mental world. The creation of neologisms involves a number of cognitive operations. Cognitive linguistics offers a new perspective on the study of neologisms. The exploration of neologisms from cognitive semantic perspective will reveal the creativity of language, help us have a better understanding of how people conceptualize and categorize their experience by virtue of words. This study takes cognitive lexical semantics as a theoretical framework, in which the theories of categorization, metaphor, metonymy and conceptual blending are integrated. The goal of this study is to examine the cognitive mechanisms of English morphological and semantic neologisms.This dissertation consists of seven chapters.Chapter 1 introduces the rationale of neologism study and the significance and purpose of the present study. The data, methodology and structure of this dissertation are also presented.Chapter 2 provides a working definition of neologism on the basis of definitions given by dictionaries and other scholars. Neologisms are defined as newly created words or established words with new meanings that describe new entities and ideas or offer new viewpoints. The concept of neologism is relative and dynamic. It is a continuum, with nonce words at one end and totally lexicalized words at the other. A neologism should have a relatively high frequency of occurrence and a large range of sources, at least known by part of the speech community. A classification of English neologisms is made and the previous studies of English neologisms at home and abroad are reviewed in this chapter.Chapter 3 briefly introduces the theories of categorization, metaphor, metonymy, conceptual blending and onomasiology, and integrates these theories into a framework of cognitive lexical semantics. It is the foundation for the cognitive exploration of English neologisms in the following chapters.Chapter 4 offers a cognitive perspective of neologisms. Neologisms are created by individuals and received and spread by the speech community. They are the product of people's categorization of the changing world. The dynamic feature of prototype category makes it possible for the creation of new words and meaning extension of established words. Neologisms have important cognitive and pragmatic functions, such as naming new entities and filling lexical gap, enhancing expressiveness and conciseness, achieving humorous effects, being euphemistic, expressing feelings and attitudes, and creating solidarity. The meaning of neologisms is motivated, closely associated with encyclopedic knowledge. Metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and conceptual blending are the major cognitive mechanisms used in the creation of neologisms. The social-cultural scripts embedded in people's mind are playing an important part in the meaning construction of neologisms.After a brief introduction to the major ways of word-formation in creating English neologisms, chapter 5 examines how metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and conceptual blending are represented in various kinds of morphological neologisms. Neologisms are not entirely new. Instead, they are combinations of existing words or morphemes. The flexible morphological structures of English facilitate novel combinations. Human's creative cognitive process is necessary in the compression of complex meaning into a single or compound word. Metaphors are used in morphological neologisms to express new concepts by means of people's previous experience. Like metaphor, metonymy in cognitive view is more than a kind of figure of speech but conceptual in nature. People tend to name new entities or phenomena by stressing their salient parts, which is guided by the metonymic thinking. The existing words can be used as templates by analogy to create new words. Conceptual blending, as a creative cognitive process, is indispensable in creation of neologisms, particularly compounds and blends. Two or more concepts are integrated through conceptual blending and new meanings emerge.Chapter 6 discusses the cognitive mechanisms of semantic neologisms, suggesting that metaphor, metonymy, analogy and conceptual blending are also playing important role in the meaning extension of established words. Metaphors function in the meaning extension by establishing different kinds of mapping among concrete and abstract domains. Metaphors are also found in the penetration of vocabulary in specific fields into daily communication and vice versa. The contiguity and the salience effect in metonymy leads to semantic shift of words. In many cases, metaphor and metonymy are interrelated. Analogy could produce a chain of words, whose meaning might gradually drift away from the original meaning. New meaning of a word first occurs in the online conceptual blending by individual language user. When this newly emerged meaning is known in the speech community, it is conventionalized and stored in people's long-term memory, ready for the next turn of conceptual blending which will bring about further extension. Meaning extension of established words can be regarded as a by-product of the operation of conceptual blending.Chapter 7 summarizes the study, and discusses its implications for the translation of English neologisms into Chinese, English vocabulary teaching and the compilation of dictionaries of neologisms. Finally, limitations of this study are pointed out and suggestions for future researches are proposed.