A Study On The Linguistic Deviation Of Cyber-neologism Constructions

Cyber-neologism Constructions(CnCs)are the most vivid and vital components in cyber language system.These popular expressions such as �X kong�,�wo keneng X le jia Y� and �P haishi bu P,A jiuzai nali,bu M bu N� are self-contained,which cover from lexical,syntactic to discourse levels in the language continuum.They are excellent materials for studying the co-variance of language and society.The on-line research on CnCs is conducive to revealing the basic laws in language production,transformation and even extinction processes and can enlighten us about the nature of language.Therefore,many scholars conduct researches on cyber neologisms from rhetoric,translatology,linguistics and some other perspectives.Despite the abundant studies of cyber neologisms at linguistic level,most of them are generally concentrated on the description of the surface features of CnCs,or on the exploration of the cognitive characteristics of one single CnC.There is further space to the application of Construction Grammar theory to explore the generation and deviation mechanism,distribution characteristics and cognitive mechanisms of CnCs with self-built corpus from the perspective of whole language.Basing on Construction Grammar theory(Goldberg,1995 & 2006)and Language Deviation theory(Leech,1969),an MC model and a DCG mode are constructed in this thesis to explore the generative mechanism of CnCs.Qualitative description and quantitative analysis of the deviation forms of CnCs are conducted from lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.The corpus in this paper is set up through the exhaustive search of the cyber neologisms on the Internet,and finally a total of 278 constructions are collected to form a self-built closed corpus.The major findings of this thesis are:First of all,the deviation of CnCs presents different features at lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.The deviation mechanisms of CnCs at lexical level are dominated by grammatical deviation and semantic deviation.The deviation mechanism at syntactic level is mainly based on deviation of register,which accounts for 82.6%.The discourse level is also dominated by deviation of register and its deviation is generally caused by the deviation of the three elements of discourse,namely field,mode,and staging.Secondly,CnCs at lexical level enjoy the highest degree of grammaticalization and present more stable structural features.Phonologically,X is mainly monosyllabic and disyllabic,supplemented by a small number of polysyllabic words.As for the distribution of its parts of speech,most Xs are nouns,verbs,and adjectives,accompanied by a small number of pronouns,numerals,and adverbs.In terms of semantics,their semantic structures will be changed due to the construction coercion and show the trend of categorization.Among the 56 front-empty constructions,nominalized ones take the largest proportion of 51%,verbalization accounts for 3.6%,and adjectivalization accounts for 5.4%.Among the 40 post-placed constructions,nominalization continues to take the largest proportion of 47.5%,verbalization accounts for 35%,adjectivalization accounts for 7.5% and multifunction ones only account for 1%.The features presented at lexical level are consistent with some characteristics of modern Chinese vocabulary such as disyllabification and distribution of Chinese parts of speech.Thirdly,the development imbalance of CnCs is reflected in the following three aspects: there is a large gap existing among the construction productivity of CnCs at different levels.In the corpus of this thesis,the number of cyber neologisms at lexical,syntactic and discourse level is 100,20,and 158,and they respectively account for 35.97%,7.19% and 56.84%;it is also imbalanced in the productivity ability of different CnCs at the same level.For example,the family members of �X di� are far more numerous than those of �xue X�;In addition,there is popularity imbalance among the family members of a same CnC.For example,among the family members of �X nu�,�fang nu� enjoys higher popularity than �xue nu�.Fourthly,this paper proposes that there are four necessary stages in the transmission process of CnCs: duplication,continuation,inheritance and variation.Constructions which fail to pass all the four phases will be eliminated and fade away from people's perspective.And last,MC model and DCG model are applied to the exploration of cognitive mechanism of CnCs at the following three levels.Lexically,we take �xue X� as an example and find that in non-contextual aspect,�xue X� is coerced by multiple coercion made up of �disyllable construction�,�noun-noun modifier-head construction� and �metaphor construction�.At the same time,due to the special pragmatic environment of CnCs,the construction is also coerced by journalism context.Syntactically,we take �wo keneng X le jia Y� as an example and find that it is coerced by �disyllable construction�,�adjective-noun modifier-head construction�,�metaphor construction� and context.As for discourse level,in analysis of eight representative CnCs and their pragmatic functions,it is found that the mismatches exist between register and genre,within the register,and within the genre which are the root causes of discourse coercion.