A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Neologisms From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metonymy

Language is closely related to the development of social politics and culture.Vocabulary is the most active element in language development.With the emergence of new things,new ideas and new phenomena,neologisms come into being.Neologisms refer to words or phrases with new meanings and new forms that appear in English and Chinese recently,or refer to the original words that have new meanings or have shifted meanings due to the development of social culture.In recent years,the emergence of neologisms has attracted the attention of linguists.Looking back at the relevant researches,it can be found that the current researches on neologisms are mainly focused on the internal mechanism.Some people study neologisms from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,but few people make a contrastive study of English and Chinese neologisms from the perspective of conceptual metonymy.Based on this,this thesis is based on the conceptual metonymy theory,and takes the classification of metonymy mechanisms established by Radden and K?vecses(1999)under Lakoff’s ICM as the theoretical framework.The thesis mainly discusses the following three questions:(1)What is the role of conceptual metonymy theory in creating and understanding English and Chinese neologisms?(2)What are the similarities and differences of generation mechanisms of English and Chinese neologisms based on conceptual metonymy?And what are the reasons?(3)What are the implications of conceptual metonymy theory for second language learning?In order to answer these questions,this thesis takes English neologisms and Chinese neologisms in 2017 as corpus from Word Spy,Cambridge Dictionary and《2017汉语新词语》.The research method is based on qualitative analysis of a certain corpus.The study finds that(1)Conceptual metonymy,as a cognitive mechanism and conceptualization phenomenon,has been unconsciously rooted in human thinking.It is an important method to create neologisms in English and Chinese,and most of the neologisms can be explained by conceptual metonymy.(2)The similarities of generation mechanisms of English and Chinese neologisms based on conceptualmetonymy are far greater than their differences.The reason of similarities can be attributed to the common cognitive psychology of human beings.For example,in both English and Chinese neologisms,there are thing-and-part metonymy,event metonymy,reduction metonymy,action metonymy,location metonymy and so on,all of which follow the core concept of conceptual metonymy.(3)Due to the different cultural background,thinking mode and geographical location,the generation mechanism of English and Chinese neologisms based on conceptual metonymy is also different.In thing-and-part metonymy,English neologisms usually refer to a part of them as a whole,while Chinese neologisms often refer to every part of them as a whole;in event metonymy,English neologisms often use SUBEVENT FOR WHOLE EVENT,while Chinese neologisms often use WHOLE EVENT FOR SUBEVENT;in 2017,English neologisms do not involve production metonymy,while Chinese neologisms have a large number of such metonymies,most of which are named after animals;Chinese neologisms involve sign and reference metonymy,which is not found in English neologisms.This conceptual metonymic thinking is closely related to the fact that Chinese emphasis on meaning and English emphasis on form.(4)The cognitive operation mechanism of conceptual metonymy provides a new perspective for second language learning.Contiguity principle and salience principle are conducive to phonetic and vocabulary learning,and context relevance principle(the same cognitive domain)is conducive to discourse learning.This study is a supplement to the study of neologisms and conceptual metonymy,which not only lays a foundation for the creation and understanding of neologisms in the future,but also strengthens the conceptual metonymy theory.Moreover,some new suggestions for second language learning are also put forward.When learning unfamiliar languages,second language learners should pay attention to the nature of conceptual metonymy and the cultural differences between China and the west,and apply this cognitive mechanism flexibly to second language learning.