Study On English Noun Neologisms From The Perspective Of Figure/Ground Theory

Figure/ground theory originates from psychology. It deals with the prominenceproblem. While viewing an entity, it is impossible to perceive the figure and groundsimultaneously. Because of the different prominent features, figure tends to be perceivedearlier than the ground. The phenomenon that figure and ground are perceived atdifferent times is called figure/ground segregation. Since Talmy firstly implemented thistheory in the study of languages, cognitive linguists have taken figure/ground segregationas a basic principle for languages to organize information. Chinese scholars have alsocontributed to the study of English and Chinese languages. However, it is relatively rarerto analyze English neologisms from the perspective of figure/ground theory. Moreover,the primary researches are either based on Chinese neologisms or English compounds.In this study, figure/ground theory and English neologisms are firstly introduced,proceeding with the review of previous studies on English neologisms. Sincefigure/ground theory focuses on prominence problem and the components of someEnglish noun neologisms bare the property of being earlier perceived and thus moreprominent, this thesis would analyze English noun neologisms from the prominent viewand illustrate these nouns from the perspective of figure/ground theory. This study firstlysorts all the nouns collected from a Webster website in which the most updated Englishnew words are available into compound, derivation, conversion, analogy, blending,back-formation, acronym, new coinage and semantic change words and then analyzesthem based on figure/ground theory. It is found that out of305English noun neologismsthere exist112words able to be illustrated by figure/ground theory. They are compounds,derivations and analogies respectively. To be specific, the compounds that can beillustrated by figure/ground theory amount to56(58in total), derivations39(39in total)and analogies17(27in total). Therefore, these three sorts of words can not only be illustrated by lexical formation mechanism but also by figure/ground theory, whichprovides a cognitive method for second language learners to learn new words.Furthermore, the study finds that the prominent element of these words are different:relational compounds, property-based compounds and conjunctive compounds are able tobe illustrated from the perspective of figure/ground theory by principle of headprominence with blended compounds by figurative meaning prominence whilederivations as well as analogies by affix prominence.