Cognitive Mechanism On Lexical Semantic Extension Of Words With New Senses In Chinese

This research concerns about the phenomenon of words with new senses (WNS) in modern Chinese vocabulary. In previous research, the study of new senses seriously depends on the research of new words, lacking independence. Furthermore, the achieved results have only contributed to the external factors such as historical, social, and cultural factors that make contributions in the formation of new senses but not the intrinsic cognitive mechanism.In this research, nearly a decade newborn WNS words are collected and 250 WNS words are carefully selected for their high frequency in usage as our objects. We use the methods of quantitative analysis and qualitative description to make a comprehensive and detailed description of WNS phenomenon. At the same time, the concept of metaphor is used to explain the inner cognitive mechanism of WNS semantic extension.We find that WNS words occupy a certain proportion in modern Chinese vocabulary, which is a language variation phenomenon closely related to people's metaphorical thinking; WNS semantic extension can be divided into inner semantic extension and outer semantic extension, which involves several subcategories respectively; in addition, we have summarized five semantic features of WNS words. It is recognized that the generation of WNS does not only have the significance on semantics, but also on cognitive science, psychology and cultural studies. Last but not least, we analyze the correlated process of metaphor and WNS semantic extension, reaching the three phases and three channels for WNS semantic extension.Some insufficient discussions still exist in this thesis although the WNS phenomenon is analyzed in great detail. Particularly the linguistic data are mainly from Chinese and questions on which kind of WNS words have more probability of semantic extension and how fast their extension speed will be should be carried out in depth research.