A Study Of English Neologism Of Culture From Background-Based Conceptual Blending Theory

Language is always changing and developing over times.As the most active and sensible part,vocabulary grows fastest.Nowadays,the rapid development of science and technology enriches people's work life,which leads to the emergence of large number of neologisms that explain people's view of new things,change their old thinking patterns and expand their cognitive perspectives.Recent years have witnessed an increase of researches on neologisms from multiple angles.And the study of language itself also gives way to the study of social dimension of language.With the development of Cognitive Linguistics(CL),social and cultural factors behind language do not pass unnoticed but get more and more attention and social turn is over the horizon within Cognitive Linguistics.It is of great realistic significance to combine social and cognitive factors together to explore the law of language production and development.Given this,the present paper integrates background with Conceptual Blending Theory(BT)in an attempt to establish a new model: Background-Based Conceptual Blending theory(BBT),and quantitive and qualitive methods are deployed to study the semantic construction of all the 269 English neologisms of culture.The result shows that researches on the semantic construction of English neologism of culture must put cognition and reality together.Any research on neologism from a single perspective is incomplete;Besides,the semantic transparency of neologisms is different and there also exists slight difference in their semantic construction.269 English neologisms of culture in recent five years are collected from www.wordspy.com.The paper first analyzes the morphological feature of all the collected neologisms,finding that the bulk of the neologisms are compound words.Besides,Based on semantic transparency,269 English neologisms of culture are classified into three categories: transparent-transparent(TT);partially-transparent(PT);opaque-opaque(OO).The analysis of the three types with BBT model aims to dig the process of semantic construction of English neologism of culture,which also deepens people's understanding of neologism.