The EPB Formation Mechanism Of The Chinese Neologisms

A neologism is a new word, or an existing word with a new meaning. In the past few years, a large number of Chinese neologisms have appeared, which have attracted the attention of many scholars. However, they mainly restricted to the description of neologisms. Recently, a few scholars have conducted researches from the cognitive perspective, but still they failed to give us a thorough and satisfactory explanation on the formation mechanism of Chinese neologisms. This thesis will study it with the EPB model and explain its formation mechanism based on the 425 neologisms released by the Ministry of Education in the years of 2007 and 2008.This thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter One is a general introduction to the study, which includes the motivation, scope and purpose, methodology, data collection and layout of the thesis.Chapter Two gives a general review of the previous researches on Chinese neologisms from perspectives of lexicology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and Cognitive Linguistics. Then it discusses the gaps found in the previous researches.In Chapter Three, we put forward our theoretical framework EPB based on the previous studies. The framework is constructed on the cognitive theories of the Event-domain Cognitive Model (ECM), the Prominence Principle (PP) and the Blending Theory (BT). Based on the EPB model, we add a new category of blending, namely Homophonic Network, to the four categories of blending by Fauconnier. And then the new model will be applied to a case study.Chapter Four deals with data analysis and discussion. First, the data will be described in detail, and will be further classified into five groups, namely simplex network, mirror network, single-scope network, double-scope network and homophonic network. Then the formation mechanism of each group will be discussed with the EPB model, and the related proportion will be presented.Chapter Five draws a conclusion and lists the contributions of the thesis as follows:1.A cognitive EPB model is put forward for the first time based on ECM, PP and BT in Cognitive Linguistics, and it is applied to the formation mechanism of the Chinese neologisms.2.The 425 neologisms released by the Ministry of Education are analyzed and categorized item by item, and authentic data are obtained as follows.3.We try to define the 425 neologisms item by item.Meanwhile, the limitations of this thesis are suggested at the end in order to enlighten the future studies.