The Cognitive Development Of Chinese Word Beiju And Its Derivative Words

From2009onward, a new network nonce word Beiju appeared and became popular in many forums. The pronunciation of Beiju is the same as tragedy in Chinese. Because of the phonetic similarity between these two words, tragedy was soon replaced by Beiju on the net. As we know, Beiju could be used to describe all kinds of unsatisfying affairs in life and express one’s unhappy feeling. Soon after that a number of Beiju-based derivative words and expressions were created to form a Beiju word-set family. The popularity of Beiju-based derivatives indicate that they have rich pragmatic effects and are worth studying.After studying and referring to the relevant articles, we conclude that most scholars describe the network nonce words in two perspectives. In the first perspective, scholars focus their attention on the origin, popularity, pragmatic features and metaphor of Beiju itself. In the second perspective, the scholars transfer their topic to analyzing the characteristics and classification of all the network nonce words after introducing Beiju itself. Despite the previous researches, less literatute is found with regard to the relationship between Beiju and its derivative words, and the word-formation and categorization of Beiju derivative words. This background motivates the author to conduct the study of Beiju and its derivatives from a new view of cognitive linguistics.Thus, this thesis will base on certain theories from cognitive linguistics and focus on Beiju, Beiju-based derivatives, and expressions. Besides, a questionnaire will be done about the acquisition status and significance of Beiju and its derivatives. By analyzing the results of the questionnaire, this thesis hopes to shed some lights on the pragmatic effects of Beiju and its derivatives on other network nonce words.The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter gives a basic introduction about the research background, research objectives and research significance. The second chapter introduces relevant conceptions and theories of this field, and discusses the empirical studies from abroad and at home. The third chapter describes the cognitive development of Beiju, Beiju-based derivative words and expressions. The fourth chapter is a questionnaire about the acquisition and enlightenment of Beiju and its derivative words. The last chapter makes a brief summary and conclusion There are two findings in the thesis. The first finding is to classify Beiju-based derivatives into four categories and to analyze the two levels of metaphor in one Beiju expression. The second finding is that netizens are not quite familiar with the word formation of several Beiju-based derivatives.Two limitations of the thesis can be found in the followings. First, the thesis is lack of theoretic bases. Only the conceptual metaphor from the cognitive linguistics is used to explain those Beiju-based derivatives. Other relevant theories from cognitive linguistics are rarely used in the thesis to analyze of cognitive development of Beiju word-set, which is a great limitation. Second, the conclusion drawn from the results of the study is limited because the numbers of subjects in this study are not large enough. Thus the application of the results is limited. After the study of network nonce words from the cognitive perspective, I hope to further my study by linking the network nonce words with the language acquisition and teaching, which is also a recommendation for the further study.