A metaphorical study on chinese neologisms

Abstract

In cognitive linguistics, metaphor is a way of thinking and an important means to perceive or conceptualize the world. It is also an economic and efficient way to create new words. With the development of the society, many neologisms spring up and are widely used by people. This paper aims at examining these Chinese neologisms from the perspective of metaphor by interpreting some examples. The findings indicate that Chinese neologisms have their semantic motivations and the interpretation of them is the result of operation of human cognition mechanism, which involves the metaphorical and metonymic thinking of human beings. This study provides a new way and perspective to study Chinese neologisms, which can also be used to study neologisms in other languages as well.