Meaning Evolution Of Buzzwords And Its Motivation

In the network era, buzzwords have a significant impact on discourse facts and cultural phenomenon in recent years. From a common word to a buzzword, in addition to its own semantic evolution of reasons, more important is the social events motivation from the outside, which is an essential element to produce buzzwords. Tuhao is a word with a long history, its meaning has experienced several development period. On the eve of the founding of New China, it experienced the last high-tide period. Then Tuhao gradually withdraw from the stage of history. But after a half century, in the second half of 2013, Tuhao re-appeared in the vision of the people with a whole new meaning. This is not a coincidence, but has close relationship with the contemporaneous emerging social hot issues. From a common word to a buzzword, Tuhao is affected by the promoting of social hot issues, with two popular semantics: The rich and The act or the perpetrator that beyond the conventional. Moreover, its grammatical function has changed, in addition to endowing with nominal function, also given the adjective and verb function. Base on the 2012-2013 Sina Weibo corpus analysis, use empirical research methods, to research the evolution process of its pop semantics, and find that there are two key social events—discourse network event "Tuhao, we be friends" and iPhone5S "Tuhao gold" be in great demand—that have a critical effect on the popular semantic evolution of Tuhao. Then we can try to study this case to explore the direct impact of social events on the buzzwords semantic evolution, revealing the significant influence from social events motivation on the semantic development of buzzwords.