A Tentative Study Of Netspeak Formation Process Based On The Philosophy Of Mind

Internet is growingly changing human’s mode of life. With the continuous development and extensive use of network technology, network culture has been deeply integrated into people’s values and humanistic spirit. As the product of network culture, Netspeak has made huge influences on the present language life. The life with Netspeak has formed a new sub-system of people’s daily language life. Those unable to use modern information technology to deal with the language are likely to become information marginalized today, and even more, social marginalization. So, Netspeak plays a vital role in promoting the connections among people.Early studies of Netspeak are focused on the definition, nature, attitude and criterion. Later, many linguistic scholars turn their views to the meaning and the social cognitive psychology of Netspeak. Modern linguistics, cognitive semantics and pragmatics probe this issue by proposing different linguistic approaches, laying a solid foundation for the interpretation of Netspeak. However, few of scholars in those studies have dealt with Netspeak interpretation from philosophy. The present study attempts to give a tentative explanation of Netspeak from a new perspective, the philosophy of mind.Philosophy of mind(POM), recognized as the first philosophy in the 21 st century by the British philosopher and linguist John Searle. POM holds that language can reflect human mind to some extent. Language can mirror the mind, through language we can observe how human’s mind works at large. On the contrary, POM provides theoretical bases of language generation from the point of mind. For Netspeak, fewer scholars have ever concerned about the root causes and the formation process of Netspeak with POM. The present paper explores the theories of intentionality, supervenience, usage event and quale-sense against the background of POM to investigate how Netspeak is generated and what the root causes of Netspeak are. Under the perspective of POM, the formation process of Netspeak corresponds to the subject’s consciousness process. Based on the consciousness of subject, the formation process of Netspeak is divided into three stages:(1) event---the first selection---the directed usage event;(2) the directed usage event---the second selection---pre-language usage event;(3) pre-language usage event---usage event(Netspeak). With these three stages discussed, the article comes to a conclusion that the formation process of Netspeak is a process from event to usage event. Besides, it is noted that the intentionality plays a key role at the very beginning stage---the directing process. The intentionality includes intentional attitude and intentional content. The intentional attitude is a gist of the direction, while the intentional content is the place where intentional attitude directs at. Then, the article explores the interpreting process of Netspeak and points out that people interpret Netspeak on the foundation of quale--sense. Based on the discussion of three processes of Netspeak: directing process, generating process and interpreting process, the paper builds an integrated model explaining the Netspeak process from origination to transmission.As for the significance of this study, on the one hand, it makes a preliminary exploration to the formation process of Netspeak, which can help people to have a deep understanding of Netspeak. On the other hand, the analysis of formation process of Netspeak is also an analysis of people’s mental process, which to some extent can help people communicate effectively and successfully.