A Study Of Semantic Generation Mechanism Of Network Catchwords Under Conceptual Integration Theory

Along with the further development of the Internet and the number of the Netizen continues to increase, with this background, a newly-born linguistic phenomenon network language appeared and developed rapidly, and it has a tremendous impact on real life. This kind of phenomenon attracts extensive attention of the whole society. The thesis will focus on the semantic generation mechanism of Chinese Network Catchwords from the perspective of the Conceptual Integration Theory. Chinese Network Catchwords here refer to the words used popularly on Internet, including Chinese characters, English words, emoticons, etc.As one of the most influential theories in cognitive linguistic field, Conceptual Integration Theory has attracted special attention from researchers due to its strong explanatory power. Chinese Network Catchwords, as the new language variety as well as the new study material in linguistics, can be explored from the cognitive point of view with Conceptual Integration Theory. The present study endeavors to enrich the current study of Chinese Network Catchwords from a relatively new angel as well as to examine the explanatory power of Conceptual Integration Theory in this new language variety.It illustrates the construction of cognitive model and the mechanism of the meaning generating from new angle such as Conceptual Integration Theory mental space, Conceptual Integration network, common space, input space, mapping, relations, compression, emergent structure, this not only can be used to explain the semantic and metaphor mechanism, more important is that it still a basic cognition pattern for us to think and know the world, and is also the only way for our survival and continuous innovation.As far as the current situation of researches of network catchwords is concerned, a majority of studies, only introduced its definition, category and cultural analysis, seldom study the network catchwords from the perspective of conceptual integration theory. This thesis, with the help of Conceptual Integration Theory proposed by linguists Fauconnier and Turner, according to the collected information on the network to make the accurate definition and category of the catchword, and sums up the characteristics, discuss the Semantic Generation Mechanism of Network Catchwords from the cognitive domain. We hope this will contribute to later explorations in related fields.