American Neologisms: Their Metaphorical And Contextual Meanings

Words are the most active and apt to change. With the development of society today, new English vocabulary sweeps in at a rate much faster than at any other historical periodof time. New words are being invented or introduced every day to express new things andnew changes. Many linguists pay much attention to this growing trend, and work outnumerous dictionaries and academic papers of English new words. However most of theresearches concerned focus on the morphemic structure of new words, but say little aboutthe underlying reasons for their existence.After reviewing some literatures on neologisms on hand, the author finds twoapproaches to the growing American neologisms. Firstly, the connotation of a neologismis often diverted from its literal meaning and is motivated by mental association, namely, metaphor; and secondly the meaning of a new word can be well comprehended onlywithin the context of its culture. Based on this finding, this thesis is designed to find outthe reasons that cause American neologisms from the internal and external perspectives.The internal factor that leads to the birth of neologisms is the novelty and the variation ofa language. Modern cognitive linguistics views conceptual metaphor as a way of thinkingrather than a traditional rhetorical skill or the ornament of a language; mapping is theworking mechanism of conceptual metaphor that bridges two separate domains and offersthe way to the knowledge of the unknown and new concept we learn in terms of theknown and old one. The author attempts to prove that metaphor as a way of thinking isthe source of new concepts, and thus linguistically fosters numerous neologisms. Theexternal factor that gives rise to neologisms is cultural context, which creates new wordsto reflect the physical world for the communicative purpose. In other words, the concretecontext of a particular culture is the origin of new items and determines the specificmeaning of a new word. In addition, the metaphorical approach is grounded on ourembodied experience, which in turn constitutes the context of a given culture neologismslive by. The world context or a special context of a given culture is a critical trigger ofneologisms. The linguistic internal and external factors are inseparable, and they havecreated and will continue creating endlessly neologisms.