A Cognitive Study Of Decategorization On “X GE” Structure

In the past few years, with the unceasing development and popularization of internet, Internet Catchwords are used more frequently by people. As one of Internet Catchwords, “X Ge” structure is quite popular in today’s society and thus draws strong interest of scholars. Currently, researchers have explained this special language phenomenon from perspectives of pragmatics, cognition, and social and cultural psychology. However, many of them are incomplete and do not go deeply. With decategorization theory, this thesis focused on exploring reasons of production, and popularization of “X Ge” structure. Through a specific and deep analysis, it will turn out that decategorization of language is not only the essential part of categorization but also a significant way for human to cognize the world.Quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted in this thesis. In the collected 1000 related corpora, some typical instances are analyzed and interpreted. In “X Ge” structure, the meaning extension processes of “Ge” includes its original meaning, meanings from Tang dynasty to Qing dynasty, and meaning in network times. “X” can be analyzed in terms of part of speech, emotion color and syllables. When part of speech is mentioned, “X” can act as nouns, verbs, adjectives, numbers, and adverbs. Emotion color consists of commendatory sense, derogatory sense, and neutrality. As far as syllable is concerned, “X” can be monosyllabic, disyllabic, and multi-syllabic. Besides, metaphor and metonymy are applied to discussing the decategorizational working mechanism and reasons of “X Ge” structure words.The whole thesis consists of five parts. The first chapter is the introduction part which includes research objectives and research significance. There are two parts in the second chapter in which research status is firstly retrospected, and then comes perspectives of current research. The third chapter is the theoretical framework which consists of Classical Theory of Categorization, Family Resemblance Theory, Prototype Theory of Categorization, and decategorization theory. The fourth chapter is the analysis of “X Ge” structure, which includes different classifications of “X”, as well as the semantic functional analysis of “Ge”. The last chapter is the conclusion part.The “X Ge” structure is various and abundant. It is widely diffused with a staggering rate among the public. Its production, development and variation are grounded on some linguistic theory. In cognitive linguistics, as an important part of categorization, decategorization can be used to explicitly interpret the reasons of production and variation of “X Ge”. Therefore, through the analysis and interpretation to the collected corpora, we can concluded, on the one hand, decategorization theory plays a significant role in categorization theory; on the other hand, decatorization theory is also regarded as an important way for people to cognize the world.