A Corpus-based Cognitive Study Of English Affixoids

Affixoid is a linguistic phenomenon that usually represents the development of society.With the emergence of new words,the old morphemes are endowed with new meanings as well.The emergent form of affix is not a complex of individual parts,but is rather a continuum of compounding variants carrying features of affixes.In the present study,the very linguistic phenomenon is analyzed from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,and is viewed in a diachronic context.The cognitive mechanisms that work behind the scenes are also discussed.Constructionalization and Constructional Changes are the theoretical basis of this study.Dictionaries and corpus tools are elicited to aid the investigation of the formation process of English affixoids and their cognitive mechanisms.The frequency and historical change of English affixoids are collected with the help of contemporary corpus COCA,historical corpora COHA,and Helsinki corpus,which represent a quantitative character of the study.The qualitative aspect is explored through the theories under the framework of Construction Grammar,which consist of Constructionalization and Constructional Changes,metaphorical and metonymical models,and the Conceptual Blending Theory.We intend to address the following questions:(1)What are the characteristics of the diachronic evolution of English affixoids?(2)What is the process of Constructionalization of English affixoids? What are the factors influencing it?(3)How do cognitive mechanisms operate in the creation of English affixoids?In this paper,the diachronic patterns of evolution for various types of English affixoids are outlined,and the primary changes and regulations within the framework of Constructionalization are explained.The main findings of this study are:(1)The diachronic evolution of English affixoids is both formal and semantic.The affixoids of high prototypicality gradually stabilize their structure in later ME,but their semantic meanings are relatively stable.Newly-emergent affixoids mainly undergo various semantic changes,but their forms stay stable;(2)Different levels of schematicity are displayed in the process of Constructionalization,and changes in form and meaning are observed.The potential and existent productivity of emerging affixoids is high,and the construction solidifies with the increasing frequency of use.The semantic changes in affixoids are impacted by changes in collocation preferences.Constructional coercion arises from the reciprocal influence between affixoids and bases.Additionally,semantic prosody or part of speech are also affected by the aforementioned factors;(3)The new semantic generation of affixoids can reflect the projection of domains within a metaphorical model.The semantic generation or generalization of some affixoids lies within the metonymical model,mapping within one cognitive domain.In the case of affixoids that entail the blending of two source words,the underlying logic of their semantic construction is conceptual blending.Theoretically,this study can be taken as the evidence of the feasibility of corpus-cognitive research paradigm.Practically,this thesis can provide information for English teaching activities that help deepen the understanding of lexical constructions.