A Cognitive Semantic Study Of Dietary Neologisms In English And Chinese: With Analogical Words As An Example

Vocabulary is the window of social development. It is natural for neologisms coming forth when there appear new phenomena and new things. Dietary words are no exception.In our study of English and Chinese dietary neologisms, we find that a large number of them are created by analogy which is a hot topic of linguistic studies. In the previous studies at home and abroad, some scholars paid attention to the rhetorical effects of analogy; some stressed the building rules of analogical words and regarded analogy as one of the most important ways of producing new words; some emphasized the internal relationship between the structure and the meaning of analogical words; others focused on the pragmatic effects of analogy and viewed analogical words as part of meme. However, few have made cross-language studies from the angle of cognition.Comparing the dietary neologisms with the existing ones from the angle of word-formation, we find there is little difference. Therefore, different from the analysis of neologisms and analogical words from such perspectives as rhetoric, morphology, etc. we have discussed the dietary analogical neologisms in English and Chinese from a cognitive perspective by applying the theory of cognitive metaphor, paying special attention to the semantic feature rather than the word-formation of the English and Chinese dietary neologisms. In this way, the cognitive mechanism of those neologisms is exposed through semantic analysis. What is more, the commonalities and differences of the new words as well as their causes are revealed by making a cross-language study.We have mainly collected our data from such dictionaries of new words as New Words Dictionary (2003), 20th Century Words (2002), The Wordfinder Dictionary of English Neologisms (2003), The New Century Dictionary of English Neologisms with Chinese Translation (2000), Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary (Extended fourth edition) (2002), The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (2002), and website www.wordspy.com to collect English dietary neologisms in the past ten years. Based on these data, we synthesize the method of comparison as well as quantitative and qualitative analysis in the study.The significance of the study lies in the following four points: (1) reflecting some changes and development of the whole lexical family as well as the society; (2) making up for the deficiency of previous studies and providing a new way for probing into analogical words; (3) revealing the commonalities and differences between English and Chinese dietary analogical neologisms by making a comparative research; (4) further proving the strong explanatory power of the theory of cognitive metaphor.Our research findings show that the commonalities of dietary analogical neologisms in English and Chinese far outweigh the differences, either in their formation or in their cognitive mechanism. This is because the way people experience tends to be identical since we live in the same objective world and own the basic same cognitive mechanism. Besides, the rapid development of the society and the globalization of economy have an indelible impact on the formation of commonalities. Of course, influenced by the different life styles together with the different historical and cultural backgrounds between the English-speaking countries and China, differences are unavoidable between English and Chinese dietary analogical neologisms.