An Exploration Of Contemporary Chinese Variations In Conceptual Blending

Language and society are interdependent, and covariance exists between them. (W. Bright, 1964) The development of society leads to language variations which are fully reflected in the different facets of any language system. The facet of lexicon appears to be the most active element in the language system and is swift to respond to social changes. With the advancement of modern society, a large number of new things, phenomena and ideas are constantly emerging, which are immediately reflected in the lexicon, thus many new words appear. On one hand, social progress is the fundamental cause for language variations, and social changes and innovations in politics, economy, science and technology, culture etc. result in the emergence of many new words; on the other hand, the characteristics of language and its internal elements undoubtedly influence the types of word formation and the trends in variations. Different from Indo-European languages, the Chinese language is a system with ideograms combining sound, form and meaning together as a whole. Its sound, character, syntax and meaning affect the generation of new words. Most of the new words in Chinese are non-compositional compounds except for some loan words and old words with new meanings. Traditional semantics holds that meaning is the content and center of language, and that word coinage by meaning is the nature of word emergence. Yet it adheres to the conception that meaning is single, isolated and static. This approach to analyze the motivation of word generation can not give a satisfactory explanation. Departing from the viewpoint of traditional semantics, cognitive linguistics approves of the hypothesis that linguistic study covers three aspects: reality, cognition and language. Language formation experiences objective and subjective operation processes, and language is generated by embodied mind. Cognitive linguists think that the motivation for the construction of words can be explored. Linguistic cognition is the process of conceptualization which is based on mental spaces, subjectively reflecting the embodied world. The semantic facet of language, which is realized by phonetics and lexicogrammar, originates from the construction of conceptual structures. Jackendoff (1983,1987,1990) puts forward conceptual semantic theory which is based on conceptual structures of lexicon, and says that concept means"a mental representation that can serve as the meaning of a linguistic expression."(Jackendoff, 1990:11) In other words, concept corresponds to meaning. Conceptual structures are the structures of mental representation of words. The theories of mental spaces, mappings in thought and language and conceptual blending are advanced by Gilles Fauconnier (1985/1994,1997,2002) and Mark Turner(2002), who point out that conceptual blending is a universal cognitive competence of human beings, which has been proved by neuroscience and cognitive psychology. The theory of conceptual blending has become a most important part in cognitive linguistics, providing an enlightening perspective to explain meaning construction and language formation, especially from the viewpoint of the emergent meaning in the conceptual blending process. In the light of the blending theory, this dissertation studies the motivation of the meaning construction in Chinese language variations on the basis of the new words in the annual reports issued by the Ministry of Education and China's National Linguistic Work Committee since 2005. Before exploring the motivation and the generation process in detail, this dissertation analyzes the causes of new words emergence from the perspective of sociolinguistics and induces the overt characteristics of Chinese language variations, for the purpose of surveying the reality of Chinese language changes and indicating the necessity and feasibility of this study. Then this dissertation generalizes the shortcomings of traditional linguistics in explaining the mechanism and process of word generation, pointing out that the theory of conceptual blending has advantages in the analyses of word formation. With the help of the theory, two-syllable compound words, metaphorical words, parodying words, and others are conducted specifically. Finally the cognitive features of Chinese language variations are concluded, and the inspiration is drawn from this dissertation.