A Study Of Chinese And English Cyber Language Based On Construction Grammar

Since one of the greatest inventions, the Internet, came into people’s life, cyber language has become one of the hottest topics for scholars. This study presents a comprehensive analysis and discussion of cyber language based on Construction Grammar, to which relatively fewer scholars have devoted their attention. Through analysis and discussion, the author is expecting to present a better understanding of cyber language.However, the purpose is not easy to achieve. It initially requires the author to collect enough typical examples of cyber language in Chinese and English, then to analyze and discuss them in a proper framework. Considering this, it is necessary to have an overall study of cyber language and set the theoretical framework. This thesis is mainly based on the discussion of productivity of construction in Construction Grammar and classifies the constructions through the ways of productivity. Due to the difficulties of analyzing every construction in a particular way, the author takes some typical constructions as examples to analyze and then discusses them in the aspects of semantic features, usages, social psychology, etc.According to the analysis and discussion, the implications for the study of cyber language are drawn. It is obvious that cyber language can be studied in CxG for the particular features of construction, of which the main one is "form-meaning pairs".(Goldberg2006,3) The high productivity and expansion of cyber language can be illustrated by the means of productivity of construction. Moreover, four factors (type frequency, storage of constructions, netizens’ creative spirit, and high-techniques) may influence the expansion of cyber language.With the improvement of people’s material life, more and more people may step into the world of the Internet. As the netizens become the majority of the people in society, it is no doubt that cyber language may be widely applied in our daily life, even in our non-digital daily life. In this case, cyber language will be much more various and influence the development of our language.Although a lot of scholars think it is not good to advocate the usage of cyber language, the author still holds that human’s wisdom is reflected by the cyber language significantly. It is necessary to have a better understanding of it and it’s worthy to be studied in the future.