A Sociocognitive Study On The Semantic Change Of Challenge Construction (1970-2020)

With the goal of developing our society,human beings are constantly transforming the world.This man-made change,together with unknown natural disasters,makes us stand in uncertainty,danger,and challenge.Social transformation may give rise to language variation,which in turn can indicate the changes that have occurred in history.For example,the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pneumonia in late 2019 poses enormous challenges to people all over the world.Then,the new English word COVID-19 appeared,as well as the new collocation,the COVID-19 challenge.The English word challenge is like a mirror that can reflect the challenges facing human beings,and its semantic change connotes the sociohistorical evolution.Therefore,this thesis selects challenge to examine its semantic evolution.On the one hand,it aims to clarify its cognitive mechanism,on the other hand,it aims to shed light on the co-variance between language and society.Previous research on semantic change has covered multiple fields and perspectives,including lexicology,syntax,semantics,pragmatics,and cognitive linguistics.However,they are deficient in quantitative analysis and do not explain the mechanism of semantic change comprehensively.In view of the limitations of previous studies,this thesis,from the perspective of critical cognitive linguistics,takes conceptual blending theory as the basic theoretical framework,combines ideology and construal theory,and establishes the ICB model(I stands for ideology,C for construal theory,and B for conceptual blending theory)to illustrate the mechanism of semantic change of challenge.Critical cognitive linguistics follows the empirical view and the encyclopedic view of cognitive linguistics,and also adheres to the view of meaning construction characterized by ideology.Under ICB model,the social subject construes things from different perspectives,activates relevant schema and form mental spaces.As the spaces are integrated,the semantic meaning of challenge is constructed under the control of ideology.According to Goldberg’s(2006,2019)Cognitive Construction Grammar,this thesis holds that challenge is stored in memory in the form of a construction(a form-function pairing),which is the basic representation of language knowledge in the mind.With social transformation,people’s experiential knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge of challenge have shift in practical meaning,and its cognitive structure has also changed accordingly,resulting in its semantic variation.As a result,News reports with “challenge” appearing in headlines have been collected from The New York Times from 1970 to 2020 to build a closed corpus.Then Ant Conc is applied to search for challenge collocates and the top 50 of them with the highest frequency are examined to make a systematic quantitative study.Their specific contexts show that the challenge construction mainly occur in four registers: politics,economy,law and social life.According to the frequency of its collocates,challenge is mostly used in the legal domain.Its co-occurrence with court and law is among the most frequent,reaching 177 and 118 times respectively.The specific context of these collocates reflects some typical problems in American society,such as discrimination against blacks,women,and homosexuals,and challenge constructs in such context means to fight against discrimination through legal strategies.The second is politics.In this domain,the frequency of collocates president and election are relatively higher,127 and 68 times.It demonstrates that many issues of US presidential election stand out,such as the supervision of campaign funds,the qualification of voters,and the political and ideological polarization caused by partisan competition.Challenge in such context means to question the electoral rules or the qualification of a voter.Third,in the economic domain,the frequency of tax is 42 times.The author puts focus on the discussion of the US property tax system.In this context,challenge refer to the formal objection to the current property tax.Finally,in the domain of social life,it covers health care,school education,sports competitions,etc.Collocate cup appears most frequently in this domain,90 times,which specifically refers to the America’s Cup.In such context,challenge refers to the difficulties faced in competing for the cup.The results show that over the past 50 years,the semantic meaning of challenge construction,under the social evolution in the United States,has changed in the four registers.There are two main reasons for those changes.One is the civil rights movement in the 1960 s and 1970 s,and the other is the economic crises since the 1970 s.It is found that the meaning shifts of challenge construction align with the corresponding societal changes,which is reinforced by this empirical study of its collocates.Such finding further proves that semantic change is particularly susceptible to extra-linguistic factors,especially the change of the signified and the change of social structure.In addition,this study demonstrates the validity of clarifying the cognitive mechanism of semantic change through ICB model,which provides a new method for semantic research and a new analytical framework for critical cognitive research.