A Cognitive Study On English Political Neologisms From The Perspective Of Hobbes' Incorporation Theory

As an immediate reflection of social culture, public psychology and human cognition, neologisms provide an effective way for us to know about human society, psychology and cognition. Scholars have made various researches about English neologisms from the perspectives of Lexicology, Sociolinguistics, Translation, Cognitive Linguistics, and so on. But few studies are about English political neologisms and most of these studies only focus on the superficial aspects of English neologisms. Even though there are studies from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, these studies only pay attention to the cognitive dimension neglecting the great role of social factors in the cognitive processing of neologisms.In light of the drawbacks of previous studies, this thesis proposes the PIB model by integrating prototype theory(PT, which holds that the formation of a new concept is based on the prototype categorization), incorporation theory(IT, which emphasizes the great influence of ideology on the usage and selection of language) and conceptual blending theory(CBT, which sees the formation of a new concept as the integration of two existing concepts) to study the cognitive mechanism of English political neologisms from the perspective of Cognitive Sociolinguistics, and the corpus of this thesis is composed of 129 terms of English political neologisms from 2000 to 2014 collected from the three websites: Wordspy(www.wordspy.com), Global Language Monitor(www.languagemonitor.com) and Language Tips of China Daily(www.chinadaily.com.cn/language_tips).Based on the literature review about English neologisms and the 129 terms of English political neologisms, the PIB model is proposed and after analyzing these terms it is found that PT, IT and CBT can complement each other and be integrated as the PIB model to illustrate the cognitive mechanism of English political neologisms. And according to the working mechanism of the PIB model, the cognitive processing of these 129 terms of English political neologisms can be divided into four types of network: Simplex network, single-scope network, mirror network and double-scope network.