| Neologism has been in existence during the process of language development. It has greatly enriched language system and vividly reflected the marks left in the process of human beings’evolution and social progress. Facing the various new objects around, people always respond well, either by coining new words or through endowing new meanings on the existing words to refer to the new objects. Of the two ways, the latter can embody more of the economical principle of human language and the principle of cognitive economy.However, neologism was not paid due attention in China. Till Lv Shuxiang appealed to academics for paying more attention to the new words and the new meanings in1984, there have been some researches on neologism. Those researches usually focus on describing the phenomenon of neologism, summarizing the characteristics of new meaning and classifying the ways of the arising of new meanings. The previous scholars and researchers attributed the arising of new meanings to such external factors of language as social progress, or internal factors of language system as borrowing or simplification. From2006on, there have been some scholars applying the theories of cognitive linguistics to probe into the phenomenon of neologism, starting to uncover the reason of new meaning arising from a cognitive perspective. Most of them explained the reason why new meaning arises by applying the theories of metaphor, metonymy or conceptual blending. However, they did not combine the theories of category, metaphor and metonymy to explain neologism.From2008State Language Commission has been publishing Language Situation in China every year, in which various investigation reports and real-state data are reported. The linguistic data are collected from the language material of the current year or the previous year, such as print media, audio media and network media. These fresh linguistic data reflect both the contemporary social life and people’s thoughts and concepts. It is widely believed that the linguistic date for language research should be collected from the real life. The liguistic date abstracted from Language Situation in China are suitable for language research due to its freshness and authoritativeness. Therefore, the linguistic data in this study is collected from A Survey on the Usage of New Words and Expressions in the Media2012in Language Situation in China:2013. In this survey there are eight Chinese expressions in total marked "*" indicating that they have been endowed new meanings. This thesis aims to reveal the cognitive mechanism underlying neologism by analyzing these eight Chinese expressions one by one. Under the framework of cognitive semantics, the author combines the theories of category, metaphor and metonymy to explain and elucidate how the new meanings arise from the eight Chinese expressions one by one, by analyzing the features of the semantic categories of these expressions. Then inductive method is employed to summarize the roles of semantic category, metaphor and metonymy in generating new meanings. At last, the author sums up the cognitive mechanism underlying neologism.The result of this research demonstrates that:1) neologism reflects that language meaning change has tightly bound up with human embodied experience and cognitive system;2) the phenomenon of neologism is in essence the extension of semantic category;3) the extendibility of semantic category enables new meaning arising to be possible;4) metaphors based on similarity and metonymies based on contiguity are the motivations of semantic category extension, in other words, the new meaning can be assimilated into an existing semantic category as a result of possessing the features that are similar to or contiguous with the features of the original meaning which is the prototypical member. |
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