A Study Of English Neologisms From The Perspective Of Metaphorical Cognitive Mechanism

With the development of social politics, economy, and science and technology, neologism phenomenon which is particular sensitive to the fast-paced life of modern society is attracting widespread interest with inter cultural communications growing. However, traditional studies of English neologisms are mainly focus on external factors of neologism generation and the ways of word formation, and people pay little attention to internal cognitive mechanism of neologism generation. Therefore, this thesis might try to explore internal metaphorical cognitive mechanism of neologism production by making use of cognitive metaphor theories.In the1970s, the appearance of "metaphormania" in the international academic arena speeds up the development of the study of metaphor. It promotes the production of breakthrough achievement to a large extent in the1980s. After that metaphor is considered as human beings’basic way of thinking and one way of human beings’cognitive styles. The core idea is that metaphor is not merely a rhetoric act of language, but a mode of thought and an effective cognitive tool for human to know abstract things in terms of concrete ones. Metaphor’s cognitive function begins to receive widespread attention in modern societies where information keeps changing fast and many new things keep springing up. The further research of metaphor’s cognitive function has penetrated hot areas of many disciplines deeply. Meanwhile, new words (also named neologism) have already drawn general attention from the theoretical field. Language may change when changes take place in social life. As the most active factor of language, lexicon is very sensitive to the changes in social life. Neologism is the best expression. In this thesis I use the methods of quantitative analysis and qualitative description to make a comprehensive and detailed description of neologism phenomenon. In this thesis, we also analysis how does metaphor work in new words’formation, study and calculate the proportion of metaphorical new words in English new words, discuss how to comprehend and grasp metaphor and its cognitive functions, how to understand new English words by using metaphors, and how to instruct English vocabulary teaching by using metaphor views.This thesis totally includes five chapters. The first chapter is the part of introduction. This chapter mainly makes brief description of current research situations about metaphor and neologism, and states clearly the thesis’s objectives, significance, and the basic framework. The second chapter mainly discusses new English words. It makes systematically description of causes, forms, and classifications of English new words. The third chapter briefly reviews the development history and recent hot fields of metaphor, and some most influential metaphor views which especially focus on the part of cognitive metaphor views. The fourth chapter mainly deals with the metaphor phenomenon in English new words. There are three targeted researches:metaphorical mechanism of new words’formation, how many stages does word-formation have, and the universality of metaphorical new words in the whole English new words. In the fifth chapter, we will discuss the important role which metaphor’s cognitive function plays in English vocabulary teaching. There is a comprehensive conclusion at the end of this thesis.