A Cognitive Study Of Korean Neologisms

Language is an open system with strong features of time.It develops with social transformation and closely relates to contemporary political change,economic development,scientific progress,and cultural communication.Within the linguistic change,pronunciation and grammar remain relatively stable,while vocabulary is active for its integration of openness,sensitiveness and representativeness.With the appearance of new phenomena,new things,new ideas,and new concepts,the vocabulary corresponding to them come into being,which is known as neologism.Neologisms not only enrich the lexical system,but reflect the pulse of the epoch,together with people's new way of thinking and new mode of knowing.This dissertation studies the 2854 neologisms released by National Institute of Korean Language from the perspective of categorization,conceptual metaphor and metonymy,integration of concepts in cognitive linguistics.With the qualitative,quantitative and statistic methodologies,it analyzes the cognition of the Korean neologisms,so as to reveal the modes of thinking in neologism coinage,their psychological mechanisms and cognitive features,as well as people's abilities to have their objects and experiences categorized,conceptualized,and to know the world through language.This dissertation is divided into six chapters,with their main contents as following:Chapter 1 explains why we should study neologisms,clarifies the purpose and significance of this study,and points out the objects,methodologies,and synthesizes the previous studies on neologisms,and introduces the structure of this dissertation.Chapter 2 begins with the definitions of neologism in various dictionaries in English,Chinese and Korean.Combining the explanations made by scholars of China and Korea,with reference to the online sources,this dissertation initiates a new definition to neologism.Neologism is the newly appearing words in a period that offer senses of freshness and mystery.They are words with which people express new idea,name new objects and phenomena,and convey new information.Neologisms include new coinages that have new shapes as well as words of expressing new ideas,new phenomena and new information.It also includes foreign terms and revitalized words.Neologisms are used in a wide range and meet the linguistic norms of the language.This chapter classifies them according to the criteria of parts of speech,derivations,etymology,registers etc.And introduces the cognitive theoretical background of neologism.It integrates the theories of categorization,metaphor and metonymy,and integration of concepts together to cognitive semantics and uses them as the theoretical basis of a cognitive study of neologismsChapter 3 introduces neologisms from the cognitive point of view.It first introduces the cognitive path of the neologisms:Individual creation-communication-stabilization.It then explains that the nature of the neologisms is the consequence of categorization and integration of concepts.Next it summarizes the significance of the neologisms as conclusiveness,fuzziness,creativity,as well as the encyclopedic,logic and national features.Last it explains the pragmatic functions of the neologisms,which include naming,vocabulary enriching,convenience,attractiveness,modification sarcasticism etc.Chapter 4 explains the cognition of words with new meanings.It indicates that metaphor,metonymy and the integration of concepts play the essential role in the new meanings of the old words.There are four types of neologisms that have come into being with the effect of metaphor.They are expressing abstract concepts with concrete ones,expressing abstract concepts with ones,expressing concrete concepts with abstract ones,and expressing concrete concepts with concept ones.There are two types of neologisms that have come into being with the effect of metonymy:the one made by whole-and-part metonymy,and the one made by part-and-part metonymy.Moreover,the development and change of neologisms are influenced by more than one factor.Therefore some of the neologisms are the products of both metaphor and metonymy.The expanding of vocabulary meaning is the consequence of people's knowledge of the world as well as their communication with the outside,which is natural for the expansion of human cognitive range and the linguistic evolution.Lexical polysemy is mostly the product of the confluence between metaphor,metonymy and the integration of concepts,which is the most important modes of linguistic development,as well as the new concept of human cognition.It is also an important way to expand the established knowledge.Chapter 5 explains the cognition of newly coined neologisms.It first classify them according to the derivational rules.These neologisms are divided into six types:compounding,fusion,abbreviation,derivation,and borrowing.Among them,suffix-derivation has the greatest numbers.After that,fusion,compounding,abbreviation,borrowing,generating,and prefix-derivation.The chapter then exemplifies with derivations,fusions and compounding,explains the emergence of their meanings with the help of metaphor,metonymy and integration of concepts,and indicates that these three ways are also predominant in this category of neologisms.Due to the regular and fixed meanings condensed in the affixes,the meanings of these neologisms are more highly predictable.The metaphoric mechanism of derivations is mostly reflected by the word roots Metaphor in the compounds is reflected by the fact that only the alluding appears,not the alluded.Among the fusions,metaphor is mainly formed with the similarities between the alluding and the alluded in terms of the feelings and features they give.Metonymy's role in derivations is mainly represented by the substitution of whole for part or with features of categorization.Metonymy in compounds are represented between the whole ICM and its parts as well as between the whole ICM and its members.Metonymy in fusion is usually realized by way of replacing the whole with part of it.The process of conceptual integration is so complicated that the integrated meaning is not a sum of the componential meanings.The conceptual integration may be either linear or non-linear.It has four categories:Two concepts juxtaposed as a brand new concept with more accurate meaning,the derived or expanded new concept,the relationship of modifying and modified,the metaphoric relationship between two concepts.Chapter 6 summarizes the whole dissertation and points out its limitations.Neologism is the consequence of people's conceptualization and categorization of the objective world.A cognitive analysis of Korean neologisms discloses the way of thinking,the psychological mechanism and the cognitive features during the producing of neologisms.The process in which people coin the neologisms reflects the human ability of understanding the world with language.