A Study Of English Political Neologisms Based On The CBD Model From The Perspective Of Cognitive Sociolinguistics

Language is the product of social development.With the changes of the time and the development of science and technology as well as the emergence of new things,language is constantly updated.At the same time,language reflects the social reality objectively and instantly.Therefore,we say that language and society have a close relationship and they coexist mutually.As the most active part of language,the change speed of neologisms is even more irresistible.English political neologisms,as a special kind of neologisms,often reflect the current political situation,political events,economic and cultural policies in real time.But the emergence of English political neologisms is by no means groundless;it is bound to certain rules,so it is of great significance to explore the generation mechanism of English political neologisms from the cognitive and social perspectives to further understand the meaning construction and its social construction so as to reveal the social realities and the political ecology behind the words.Previous studies on English neologisms mainly involve lexicography,lexicology,morphology,pragmatics,sociolinguistics,cognitive linguistics and cognitive sociolinguistics,etc.However,most of the relevant studies mainly focus on the definition of new words,the collection and revision of new words,or on the general discussion of the reasons of the emergence of neologisms from the sociolinguistics and there is little theoretical support.For example,traditional sociolinguistics pays more attention to the listing of linguistic phenomena but lacks the investigation of the cognitive mechanism behind the words.With the development of cognitive linguistics,the study of neologisms has gradually turned to the analysis of factors in language.Scholars start to pay attention to the cognitive mechanism behind language,but generally speaking,there are not so many researches.Ellis & Freeman(2009,p.2)point out that the reasons that influence language's change are mainly determined by two factors: reality and cognition.Processes of human interaction along with domain-general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language.That's to say,human cognitive processing and the real society work together on the generation of new words.Therefore,from the cognitive and social perspectives,the author tentatively establishes the CBD model(CB stands for the conceptual blending theory,D stands for Foucault's theory of discourse power)to explore the cognitive mechanism and the social construction process which influence the generation of English political neologisms.Based on the CBD model,the author conducts a cognitive-social study on the semantic and social construction of 126 English political neologisms updated on the online Oxford English Dictionary from 2015 to 2017 by using qualitative and quantitative methods and concludes that the CBD model combining the conceptual blending theory with the Foucault's theory of discourse power has a strong explanatory power for the meaning construction and social construction of English political neologisms.Through the analysis,the author finds that these English political neologisms are mainly created by compounding,affixation and blending.At the same time,those new words involve many different political categories,including political institution,political policy,political actions,military affairs,international relations,race,gender discrimination and so on.In addition,based on the CBD model,the author summarizes that the process of meaning construction of English political neologisms includes main four typical cognitive integration networks: the simplex network,mirror network,single-scope network and double-scope network.