On Lexical Pragmatic Meaning Evolution Of Chinese Neologism: A Metonymy Perspective

New word is an important part of modern Chinese lexical system. There are two types of new words: one is coinage, referring to words which did not exist before; the other is neologism, i.e. the recurrence of history words, referring to words which have already existed but are endowed with new meaning.As a kind of common linguistic phenomenon, new words have been paid more and more attention by scholars. Many researches on new words focus on its definition, resource, classification and relationship to society and culture, but few on the internal mechanism of lexical meaning evolution. In daily communication, the meaning of some new words often deviates from original meaning, which finally leads to pragmatic meaning.The object of this study is the lexical meaning evolution of Chinese neologism. It aims to explore the metonymic presentation and interpretation of lexical meaning evolution in Chinese neologism under the framework of cognitive metonymy. This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One provides a general introduction to this thesis.Chapter Two presents the framework of the thesis, making a comprehensive description of the theory of metonymy for our study, emphasizing two kinds of metonymic relationships within the same ICM.Chapter Three focuses on the metonymic presentation of lexical pragmatic meaning evolution in Chinese neologism.Chapter Four is the core part of the research. Taking "山寨" for example, this chapter applies the theory of metonymy to the interpretation of pragmatic meaning evolution of Chinese neologism.Chapter Five discusses the inspiration of this study to neologism definition in Chinese online dictionary.Chapter Six summarizes the major findings of the present study and points out the limitations of the research.And then some suggestions for further study of lexical pragmatic meaning are presented.