Cognitive Study Of Counterfeit X Construction From The Perspective Of Memetics Theory

The word Counterfeit, which means imitation,piracy or reduplication, roots from Cantonese dialect. Counterfeit culture is initiated by folk IT force, which originally stepped into public sight with the emergence of the word Counterfeit Cell-phone. With the help of modern media's large-scaled coverage, Counterfeit tide has successfully crashed into people's everyday topic even into spiritual life, resulting in a great number of Counterfeit words. Highly-frequent repetition and routinization has grammaticalized Counterfeit X construction into a word mold; with the constant filling in X vacancy, a large number of Counterfeit hyponyms has emerged, which has solidified Counterfeit X word mold construction.Counterfeit Phenomenon is a unique cultural aspect in China, which results in seldom deep and all-around abroad research on it. Domestically, most of the existing researches should be categorized into objective ones with contributing factors, apperceptional meaning of affixes and social and cultural aspects as its main contents. And the current studies focus on linguistics itself and its environment, which stages at the description on linguistics and ignores the interactivities between subject and object, and cognitive reasoning process. Seldom is such that analyzes mentally the reasoning process of newly-born word chain from the perspective of cognitive construction,saying nothing of researches exploring the mental reasoning applying memetics theory to the interpretation of new Chinese word chain.The study applies memetics as its theoretical frame, which started from western biology, aiming at disclosing synchronically and diachronically cultural evolution principles, decoding the universal connection among matters and revealing the essential characteristics of cultural inheritance. The concept of meme covers the fields of thoughts, languages and deeds. Language in itself is a kind of meme, which is mainly demonstrated by language, and is duplicated and transmitted with the help of language. As a result, the duplication and transmission of meme has promoted the spread and development of language. They live a dialectic and uniformed life in harmony. Meme is a kind of mental presentation and is stored in mental net as a replicator. After the duplication and transmission with language as its carrier, linguistic presentation comes into being. The methods to probe into languages from the cognitive subjects and to probe into cognitive subjects'thinking mode from memetics theory are constructive suggestion for scholars to study languages.This study focuses on the"subjectism meaning"from the perspective of cognitive construction, and uses abduction as its research method. It inspects the causations and motivations of Counterfeit X construction on a microscopical layer, stressing the construction's mental presentation as its medium between linguistic presentation and factual presentation during the formative process. At the same, the causations resulting in semantic fuzziness of Counterfeit morpheme in the construction are probed into from the perspective of Embodied Philosophy.The dissertation is made up of six parts.In introduction part, the current study situation, and this study's purpose, significance, methods and creation points are mainly presented.In chapter one, the following three points, namely, paraphrase of Counterfeit morpheme in traditional and newly-born words, semantic salience of Counterfeit morpheme, analysis from the perspective of word mold, and the collocation between Counterfeit morpheme and X morpheme, are discussed.In chapter two, psychological basis and memetic lifecycle of Counterfeit X word mode construction are investigated after discussing the term meme and memetics theory. The investigation holds that the course from Counterfeit etymology to the spring-up of Counterfeit X new words experiences the coming procedure: Counterfeit source wordâ†'Counterfeit Cell-phoneâ†'Counterfeit X baseâ†'Counterfeit X word moldâ†'Counterfeit X new words,which includes the next three phases: experiencing practical presentation, forming mental presentation and achieving linguistic presentation, and materializes a linguistic meme lifecycle of four phases: assimilation, retention, expression and transmission, and in which cognitive reasoning mechanism based on experientialism plays a crucial role.In chapter three, motivations leading in Counterfeit morpheme's salience are detected from three factors to linguistic meme, namely the regurgitation-feeding of cognitive mentality, the motivation of the cognitive mode, and the motivation of linguistic meme itself. As the first factor, according to Langacker's point of cognitive construction grammar view (1987), the morpheme X with its own autonomy is defined as semantic profile determination, whereas the morpheme Counterfeit with its own dependence on the former is defined as modifier which decides the distinctive characteristics of profile determination. Regarding the second factor, the motivation from cognitive mode to linguistic meme falls into metaphorizing phase, grammaticalizing phase and generalizing phase. Concerning the third factor, the three distinctions of the meme Counterfeit in itself ---longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity---motivates the spring-up of new words.Chapter four, from the perspective of Embodied Philosophy, discusses the semantic fuzziness of Counterfeit morpheme. The semantic fuzziness rooting from linguistic similarity is the product of physical experiences by the interaction between subjects and objects and cognitive processing, which respectively includes the eclecticism choices between factual representation and linguistic representation by experiential mind, between cognitive subject and context by metaphorical thought, and between Counterfeit morpheme and"X"morpheme by unconscious cognition.Conclusion is a summary to the study. Here the shortcoming is listed, and a possible direction for further linguistic study is offered. The birth of"Counterfeit X"is the product of physical experience and cognitive machining, as well as the eclecticism of mental cognition.