A Cognitive Study Of Analogical New Words In English And Chinese

Analogical words take on a universal and special language characteristic.They are vivid,economical,and easy to understand,so they have aroused great interest of people,who therefore have exercised extensive application of those words,and they have become an important part of new words surging into English and Chinese in recent years.The previous studies of analogical words have mainly concentrated on such aspects as the pragmatic characteristics,semantic characteristics,morphological analyses and rhetoric effects.However,few people have conducted cross-language studies from the perspective of cognition.Based on the previous studies,this thesis,collecting data from Xinhua Dictionary of New Words(《新华新词语词典》2003),New Words Dictionary(《新词语大词典》2003),20th Century Words(《20世纪新词语词典》2002),21st Century Dictionary of New English Words(《21世纪英语新词词典》2000),Newest Dictionary of New English Words(《最新新时代英语新词词典》1999)and American Speech (2002-2005),synthesizes quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to compare and analyze a large number of analogical new words in English and Chinese from different angles such as parts of speech,forms and semantic relationship classifications,so as to find out their commonalities and differences.What's more, taking conceptual blending theory developed by the well-known American cognitive linguist Gilles Fauconnier as the theoretical basis,this thesis analyzes the processes of the production and interpretation of analogical new words in English and Chinese from the perspective of cognition and reveals their common cognitive mechanism.The significance of the study lies in that,firstly,some linguists have studied analogical words,but few have conducted the cross-language comparative study of them to explore the commonalities and differences.This thesis can well make up for this limitation.Secondly,in modern society,a large number of analogical new words are surging into our life at a fast speed and frequently used,which makes them the best way to show the creativity and productivity of language.Therefore,studying their processes of production and interpretation can help us understand and learn different languages,prove the universality and common law of human beings' cognition.Thirdly,the study in this thesis makes contribution to strengthening the explanatory power of the conceptual blending theory.Through a comparative study,we come to a conclusion that the commonalities of analogical new words in English and Chinese far outweigh the differences.These commonalities can be attributed to their common cognitive mechanism,which may boil down to the mappings and conceptual blending of different mental spaces. Besides,we believe that background knowledge and two cognitive abilities,namely association and reasoning,are all indispensable and important factors in the processes of the production and interpretation of analogical new words.