English And Chinese Economy Neologisms Interpretation From Cognitive Semantic Perspective

Lexicon is the most active part of language, the barometers of social development. The emergence of new things, phenomena and notions will immediately result in corresponding neologisms, hence neologisms are seen as a mirror of modern society. Since the late 1970s, global integration has sped up the development in such fields as world policies, economy and trade, culture and education, science and technology etc. Economic activities, as fundamental activities of human society, keep rocketing during this period, leading to the springing up of economy neologisms in English and Chinese, which deserve our careful study. This thesis mainly focuses on English and Chinese economy neologisms in the 21th century as neologisms in this period are more accessible to modern economic phenomena.The previous studies of English and Chinese economy neologisms mainly focus on the level of morphology and external reasons, whereas cognitive analyses of those are quite few. By virtue of conceptual integration theory, this thesis is aimed to interpret the cognitive process of economy neologisms in English and Chinese and make a comparative study of those in terms of word-formation, semantic and sociocultural features. The methods of qualitative and quantitative and a comparative study of English and Chinese are adopted to analyze the 1000 English and 1000 Chinese economy neologisms. The results indicate:firstly, there are mainly five word formation types, namely composition, shortening, blending, borrowing and conversion; secondly, conceptual integration theory possesses a strong explanatory power to interpret the on-line meaning construction of economy neologisms in English and Chinese; thirdly, there are similarities and differences co-existing in the economy neologisms in English and Chinese and similarities surpass differences.This research still has some limitations. Firstly, due to complication of neologisms with more than three semantic units as well as space limitation, this thesis merely deals with neologisms with two semantic units. Secondly, though the conceptual blending is explanatory to the five formation types of economy neologisms, whether it is still effective to words with identical formation types in other areas or words formed through other formation types such as invention, are potential challenges needed to be further studied.