A Cognitive Study Of Neologisms Of Recreation And Sports In English And Chinese

Neologisms are the mirror and sensor of social developments and changes. The emergence of many new things, new phenomena, new concepts and new ideas in the modern times inevitably leads to the creation of numerous neologisms. Ever since the 1980s, the world has entered the information age, and science and technology have developed rapidly. Meanwhile, great changes have also taken place in the fields of economy, politics, culture and life. With the improvement of people's living standards, people begin to pay more and more attention to spiritual and cultural life. Recreational and leisure activities play an indispensable part in people's daily life. And people in modern society also attach great importance to sports and continuously raise their awareness of being healthy. Therefore, in recent years, a great many neologisms of recreation and sports come into being. Neologisms of recreation and sports, as an important part of neologisms, deserve our study.In terms of neologisms of recreation and sports, few scholars have studied this specific subject. We find that there are fewer people conducting a cross-language comparative study of neologisms of recreation and sports from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Based on the data collected from English-Chinese Dictionary (second edition)(《英汉大词典》第二版2007),American Speech (2006-2009), A Dictionary of Chinese Neologisms(《新词语大词典》2003), Cool Neologisms:Notes about 171 Chinese Neologisms(《新词酷:171汉语新词笔记》2008)and a website of English new words, www.wordspy.com, this thesis synthesizes methods of qualitative and quantitative analyses and a comparative study of English and Chinese to analyze and compare 487 English and 1,530 Chinese neologisms of recreation and sports in order to explore their commonalities and differences. The method of qualitative analysis is used mainly to discuss the parts of speech, the formation types, cognitive mechanisms and sociocultural features of neologisms of recreation and sports in English and Chinese; the method of quantitative analysis is applied to work out the figures. Besides, taking the theories of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy as the theoretical foundations, this thesis analyzes the process of meaning construction of neologisms of recreation and sports in English and Chinese from the angle of cognitive linguistics, which is aimed at revealing their common cognitive mechanisms.The significance of the study lies in the following aspects:first, some scholars or linguists have studied neologisms, but few have conducted a cross-language comparative study of the neologisms in the fields of recreation and sports—neologisms of recreation and sports, to find out their commonalities and differences in English and Chinese. This thesis can make up for this limitation. Second, in the modern society, the fact that numerous neologisms of recreation and sports come into being and are frequently used proves the creativity and productivity of language. So the study of the processes of their production and meaning construction from the perspective of cognition is good for our understanding and studying different languages and for our further exploring the common law of human beings'cognition and the universal cognitive mechanisms. Third, the study of this thesis makes contributions to further proving the explanatory power of theories of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy. Fourth, the study of this thesis has certain referential value for teaching and studying the words concerning recreation and sports in English and Chinese.Through a comparative study, the major findings of this thesis lie in the following two points:first, the theories of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy have a strong explanatory power for the analysis of English and Chinese neologisms of recreation and sports, especially for the compound neologisms and affixed neologisms. Second, the commonalities of neologisms of recreation and sports in English and Chinese far outweigh the differences in terms of their parts of speech, formation features, semantic features or cognitive mechanisms and sociocultural features. The commonalities can be attributed to common cognitive mechanisms of human beings beneath them, namely the mechanism of conceptual metaphor and the mechanism of conceptual metonymy, while the differences mainly result from such factors as the different geographical, historical and cultural backgrounds.