A Cognitive Semantic Approach To Neologisms Of Economy And Trade In English And Chinese

Neologisms refer to the words created with new forms,new meanings or new usages to express new things,new phenomena,new concepts and new ideas.They are the mirror of our society and attract many scholars.Since the late 1970s,globalization has speeded up and such fields as world politics,economy and trade,culture and education,science and technology,etc.have been developing unprecedentedly.Among them,huge changes in economy and trade dominate over others.Under this background,neologisms of economy and trade in both English and Chinese have mushroomed,which deserve our careful study.Among the researches on neologisms of economy and trade,some have discussed Chinese business words from the perspective of the external causes for their vocabulary change;some have explored the formation rules of English business new words;some have conducted a rhetoric study of the translation of new Chinese economic words.But few have conducted cross-language studies of the very subject of neologisms of economy and trade,and still fewer have looked into the subject from the perspective of cognition.Based on the previous studies,first,this thesis discusses the interpretation processes of neologisms of economy and trade by adopting conceptual blending theory to reveal their common cognitive mechanism in light with their common formation types;then,with the statistics we have done,this thesis compares a large number of English neologisms of economy and trade with Chinese ones from three different aspects,namely the aspects of formation features,semantic features and sociocultural features to explore their great similarities and slight differences behind their common cognitive mechanism.Our data mainly come from four dictionaries and a website,They are A Dictionary of New English Words(1996),20th Century Words(2002),Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary(Extended fourth edition)(2002),A Dictionary of Chinese Neologisms(2003) and a website of English new words, www.wordspy.com.Methods of qualitative and quantitative analyses and a comparative study of English and Chinese are synthesized in this thesis to analyze and compare 443 English and 1,530 Chinese neologisms of economy and trade collected.The method of qualitative analysis is introduced to discuss the formation types of neologisms of economy and trade in English and Chinese;the methods of quantitative analysis and a comparative study of English and Chinese are applied to work out the statistics and compare the data we collected.The major findings of this thesis lie in two points:first,the conceptual blending theory has strong explanatory power in the analysis of neologisms of economy and trade,especially in compound words,converted words and affixed words.The mapping models of the four mental spaces can effectively explain the on-line processes of the meanings of neologisms of economy and trade in English and Chinese.Second,the similarities between English and Chinese neologisms of economy and trade far outweigh their differences,from the analysis of their formation features,their semantic features,or their sociocultural features.These great similarities,to a great degree,result from our human cognitive psychology and their common cognitive mechanism,which boil down to the mappings and conceptual blending processes of different mental spaces,while the slight differences mainly result from their different geographical,historical,cultural conditions and so on.The limitations of this thesis include:firstly,due to the complexity in the structures of compound words and the lack of space in the thesis,we have only dealt with the compounds composed of two nouns,ignoring the analysis of other compound words.Secondly,we have failed to go further for a comparative study of the semantic cognitive mechanism of words in other fields other than those in neologisms of economy and trade in English and Chinese.They are left behind for our future studies.