A Study Of English Neologisms From The Perspective Of Cognitive Sociolinguistics

Language has inherent stability and flexibility.Stability is mainly expressed in the core meaning of words,based on which people can understand each other,while flexibility is mainly expressed in the development of the times and constantly changing.One of the most obvious changes in language is the change of vocabulary,and one of the changes is the emergence of a large number of new words.Experts at home and abroad have done many studies on social cognitive linguistics and new words in English.However,few of these studies have combined the two elements of social cognitive linguistics and English lexical neologisms.This paper examines the new words included in the Oxford English Dictionary from 2013 to 2022 from a socio-cognitive linguistic perspective.Geoffrey Leech,a leading British linguist,studied the ways in which new words were constructed after the Second World War in 1980.He classified them into three major forms of construction(compounding,affixation,conversion)and eight minor forms(acronym,blending,clipping,words from proper nouns,back formation,reduplication,neo-classical formations,others),based on their proportionality.This paper examines the new words in the March and June editions for the 10-year period 2013-2022,with reference to Geoffrey Leech’s research method.It reveals the ways in which new words are produced in this time period,and the number of new words produced in each way.Based on Geoffrey Leech’s classification,this paper finds that: First,the three new word generation methods that account for a relatively large proportion are affixation,compounding,and borrowing.In terms of affixes,suffixes are significantly more numerous than prefixes.In terms of compounding,compound nouns are more frequent,followed by compound verbs and compound adjectives,while other compound words are less frequent.In terms of borrowing,709 borrowed words from different regions can be found.Second,other less frequent forms are acronyms,blending,clipping,proper nouns,back formation and conversions.The findings suggest that changes in people’s perception of the world are responsible for the creation of new words.Faced with the intricacies of social relationships,events and environments,people must adopt appropriate verbal and social behaviors,which require social cognition.Both individual cognitive processes and social cognitive processes play a role in the formation of new words.In the process of new word generation,it is a complex construction process.Simple networks,singlerange networks,and double-range networks are common types.Simple networks explain the main reasons for the formation of acronyms,affixes,clipped words,borrowed words,proper nouns,and compound words.Single-range networks have strong explanatory power for the formation of back formation and conversion words.Double-range networks are the main motive for the production of blending and compound words.The mirror network appears less frequently and is directly related to explaining the formation of compound words.Based on the analysis above,this study hopes to shed light and help in teaching new words,translating new words,and compiling new word dictionaries.