Towards A Semantic Derivative Mechanism Of English Network Neologisms From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Language is the production of the rapid social development. The evolution of the language is a dynamic process. Nowadays era is one which is awash with network. All aspects including our society, life, culture, politics and economy all have interaction with the network, not to speak of the language. With the rapid development of the network technology, the cyber language is yielded with it. It reflects the hottest and the most prevailing phenomenon in the present society. The recency of the neologisms shows in two ways: one is the novel meaning of the existing word, people add something new on an old word to make it becomes a brand new one; the other is to create a completely neologism according to the new things and new phenomenon. No matter the old one with new meaning, or the totally creation, they all have some rules to obey. The production of novel meanings is not created out of thin air but the result of cognitive operation based on the perception of people to the outside world. The Conceptual Integration Theory has the most strongly explanatory power among numerous cognitive theories. Therefore, this paper studies the process of semantic construction of English network neologisms from the perspective of the Conceptual Integration Theory.The Conceptual Integration Theory was proposed in 1997 by Fauconnier based on the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff & Johnson. It is the further study of the conceptual metaphor and mental space theory. The CIT analyzes the dynamic process of semantic construction which is also the thinking process of human. The core foundation of the CIT is the conceptual integration network which involves four mental spaces – two input spaces, one generic space and one blended space. The information in the different mental spaces are projected to the blended space selectively and yielding the emergent structure through composition, completion and elaboration. The basic conceptual integration network contains four kinds. They are simplex network, mirror network, single-scope network, and double-scope network. This thesis utilizes the four kinds of networks to interpret the semantic derivative mechanism of the English network neologisms and sets up seven conceptual integration network models to explain the semantic construction processes for different kinds of English network neologisms.The English network neologisms in this paper are divided into five kinds including the normal type, numbers, alphabets, emoticons and code-mixing type. This is one of the findings of this paper. Among them, the normal type is distributed into compounds, blending words, derivative words, abbreviation and so on in terms of the word formation. The author found that the noun-noun compounds occupy a high quantity among the normal type during data collection. So the normal type part mainly focuses on the semantic construction analysis of the noun-noun compounds.The studies and researches on the English network neologisms are gradually broadened with the development and activeness of the science and technology. The previous studies on the English network neologisms involve the definition, origination, application, classification and so on. Few of them concern about the inner semantic construction process and cognitive interpretation of the English network neologisms. This thesis aims to interpret the semantic construction process of the English network neologisms based on the Conceptual Integration Theory. The writer builds seven kinds of conceptual integration network models to explain the semantic construction of the compounds, numbers, alphabets and emoticons respectively via the analysis of the typical cases of each kind. Although these seven network models are not brand new models which are created independently and they are all created based on the four conceptual integration networks which are proposed by Fauconnier, the author analyzes different kinds of English network neologisms and summarizes a network model that can interpret the meaning construction of this kind. The former study has not summarized the semantic construction of the English network neologisms in these kinds. This is the other finding of this paper. The author hopes that this finding can help people understanding and applying the network neologisms correctly.Model 1 shows a simplex network model which suits for a part of subordinate endocentric compounds that only has one head; Model 2 expresses the single-scope network model which explains another part of subordinate endocentric compounds; Model 3 focuses on the double-scope network model that deals with some of the subordinate endocentric compounds and most of the exocentric compounds; Model 4 explores the mirror network model which explains the semantic construction process of coordinate endocentric compounds; Model 5 and Model 6 concern with the simplex network models which study the homophony of numbers and alphabets respectively; Model 7 deals with the mirror network model that can interpret the semantic derivative mechanism of the emoticons.Due to the limitation of data collection and paper space, the semantic derivative mechanism models of some kinds of English network neologisms can not be constructed here. These deficiencies can be studied in the future.