An Analysis Of Chinese Network Catchwords From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Rising in1990s, internet has become an important means of communication, andto a great degree, it has changed people’s communication ways and lifestyle. It ispenetrating and affecting the traditional media such as telephone, television, radio andnewspaper. To meet the need of communication on the internet, a large number ofnetwork catchwords emerge with the development of economy, technologicalinnovation, linguistic acculturation and new thinking patterns. This thesis studiesnetwork catchwords from the perspective of linguistic features and meaningconstruction process by applying conceptual blending theory. Chinese networkcatchwords here refer to the words, phrases and sentences widely used on the internetin China. These words are from “Annual Top Ten Chinese Internet Catchwords”which is an activity held by popular websites and forums from2004to2013.Conceptual blending theory is an important theory in cognitive linguistics and ithas attracted much attention both in China and other countries due to its strongexplanatory power on dynamical meaning construction. Chinese network catchwordsas the new variety of Chinese reflect the development of Chinese, and their flexibleformations and novel meaning can be explored by conceptual blending theory.After analyzing the corpus, the current study explores the linguistic features ofnetwork catchwords including formations and structure, especially the dynamicalmeaning construction processes. Most of the words follow the traditional formationssuch as semantic changes of old words, newly coined words formed by compounding,derivation, and loan words. One-clause and two-clause catchwords as newly appearedforms are analyzed in this part. According to four kinds of blending networks putforward by Fauconnier and Turner, this thesis mainly analyzes the dynamic meaningconstruction process of network catchwords and we find that each category of themhas distinct blending ways, for example the blending process of words with semanticchanges is mirror network, meanwhile, compounds and derivative words are constructed by single-scope network.The current study examines the explanatory power of conceptual blending theoryand also enriches the study angle of internet catchwords.