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With the passage of the time, people find that some theories within the field of cognitive linguistics can better explain how a novel blending word is formed, how to deduce its meaning and how to memorize it. Those theories include Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) and Prototype Theory (PT). Dating back to history, CMT was first proposed in a famous book: Metaphors We Live By, a landmark in cognitive linguistics, which was written by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson (1980). The initial studies of CBT can be traced back to the case studies by cognitive linguistics, while PT started from the study of focal colors, was primarily put forward by Anthropologist Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969). Since the creation of novel blending words involve a number of cognitive operations, those studies of forerunners thus paved way for numerous modern scholars who have interest in neologism, especially in novel blending words.
1.3 Significance of the Study
From the previous chapter, it can be seen that cognitive linguistics offers a new perspective on the study of novel blending words. The exploration of novel blending words from cognitive semantic perspective will reveal the creativity of language, help giving a better understanding of how people conceptualize and categorize their experience by virtue of words. As a result, the present study of novel blending words via cognitive linguistics is of great importance.
Throughout the history, there’re only those scholars who dedicated in using one theory to explain the formation of novel blending words. Nevertheless, a reasonable annotation of the growing blending words is hard to achieve without a multi-theoretical perspective, which is exactly the originality of this thesis. The paper thus intends to probe into the meaning construction of many specific new blending words from the perspectives of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Conceptual Blending Theory and Prototype Theory as the theoretical basis. By annotating the blending words from a multi-theoretical perspective, the thesis aims to find out the usual patterns and cognitive mechanism towards new English blending words and their hidden factors. Furthermore, a hypothesis of a “regular tetrahedron model” will be made at the end of the thesis, combining the three key theories together, in order to show vividly the process of accepting new words and new ideas of human beings.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Neologism and Blending Words
Blending word is actually one type of Neologisms. First of all, it’s quite important to annotate the traditional definition of the term “neologism”. A neologism is evolved from Greek words, in which “neo” means “new” and “logos”, means “speech and utterance”. It is a newly coined term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language. The term neologism was first attested in English in 1772, borrowed from French néologisme in 1734. A neologism may also be a new usage of an existing word, sometimes called a semantic extension (Net.1).
Neologisms mainly originate in four ways: coining words through word formation rules; enriching old words with new meanings; borrowing from other languages and assimilating net-words (c.f. Xu, 2009:34). In terms of word formation rules, John Algeo (1991) claimed that creating, shortening, blending, combining; borrowing and shifting are basic ways for English new words. In the 20th Century, he did a survey which proved that among the total number of neologism, 30%-40% of new words were formed through the way of affixation. Compounding words occupied about 28%-30%, conversion, 26%, while blending and other forms, 1%-5%. However, since the late 20th Century till now, our modern time has witnessed a boom in the novel blending words far from our expedition.
In linguistics, “blending” means the process of forming a word from two or more letters that represent the sounds of a word. Blending words, (also called portmanteau word) is a combination of two (or more) words or morphemes, and their definitions, into one new word (Net.2). A portmanteau word generally combines both sounds and meanings. Nowadays, blending is regarded as a word-formation process which appears to be a quite productive and handy way to coin new words. In this way, numerous novel blending words have come into being. As a result, the mushrooming of neologism, especially new blending words have aroused many scholars’ interests in this field.