A Cognitive Analysis Of Chinese Old Words With New Meanings In Recent Ten Years

Vocabulary is the basic composition of language system. From the perspective of economy, Old words with new meanings are the most important section of vocabulary system. Old words with new meanings(OWNM) is a kind of new word that an existent word starts to acquire some new meanings as time goes. The present paper takes the OWNM in recent ten years as the object for study. Previous researches have focused on OWNM with regard to its definition, the external reason for the change, what changes they are and so on. But they are less likely to study the internal mechanism of the changes. This study focuses on the OWNM in recent ten years, with a description and explanation of OWNM, aiming to reveal the rule of evolution in OWNM’s meaning change and offer a cognitive linguistics explanation to the change in proper.The data contains 72 words. According to the series of publications Chinese New Words of the year from 2006-2012 published by the commercial press, we selected 58 words marked with OWNM. In addition, we found another 14 words of similar type from academic literature. Our study stresses two combinations:one is the combination of description and explanation, and the other one is the combination of synchronic and diachronic approach. In the paper, our focus is put on three word classes and, i.e. nouns, verbs and adjectives. The theories used in the paper are the metaphor theory, the metonymy theory and the conceptual integration theory (CIT), which are hoped to provide a well-motivated explanation for mechanism of OWNM’s meaning change.The result shows that the meaning change is closely related to people’s daily life. Especially in the era of internet, most words with new meaning are catch words generated as a result of internet culture, such as "打酱油,山寨" and so on. The change of their meaning can be explained cognitively, and it is metaphor, metonymy and CIT that motivate the change. As a result, people can well understand how the transition between the new meaning and the old one takes place.Though there are still some shortcomings, this paper has done a great job on Chinese OWNM in recent ten years from perspectives of the revolution and mechanism of semantic change, which have great significance to foreign language learners and the compilation of dictionaries.