A philosophical investigation of catchwords in Chinese

Authors

  • Qiao Huang

    College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Sichuan University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18063/fls.v1i1.1088

Abstract

Catchwords spread rapidly because of their simple form and strong replicability. New catchwords enter our daily life every once in a while. Therefore, the study of catchwords is extremely urgent, because the study of language is the study of human life. This article takes the catchword ‘wo keneng yudao le jia N' (I might encounter fake N) as an example to discuss its internal structure (which has been largely ignored in the existing research). The focus is on the study of the adjective 'fake' and its combined meaning with the noun after. Based on this, the meaning generation mechanism of the catchword is analyzed, including the relationship between necessity and probability, the evolution of meaning of the catchword, and the precipitation of construction meaning. Finally, the philosophical basis of communicative mechanism of the catchword is clarified. The main line of this study is to provide philosophical foundation for the popularity of catchwords.

Keywords:

catchword; jia N; fake N; construction grammar; generation mechanism; communication mechanism

References

Burke K (1966) Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cappelle B, Denis P and Keller M (2018) Facing the facts of fake: A distributional semantics and corpus annotation approach. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 6: 9–42.

Carston R (2002) Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cavell S (1996) Declining decline. In: Mulhall S (ed) The Cavell Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp.321–352.

Chao YR (1968) A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chen JA (2019) Multidimensional study on ‘…keneng…jia (de) N’ structure. Journal of Chongqing Three Gorges University 2: 110–117.

Deng H (2017) A textual research of the catchword ‘I might V fake N’. Modern Chinese 4: 125–127.

Dummett M (1999) What do I know when I know a language? In: Baghramian M (ed) Modern Philosophy of Language. Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, pp.309–324.

Farsi AA (2010) Classification of adjectives. Language Learning 37: 45–60.

Gibbs RW (2002) A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and implicated. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 457–486.

Goldberg AE (1995) Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Huang Y (2012) Relevance and neo-Gricean pragmatic principles. In: Schmid H (ed) Cognitive Pragmatics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyer, pp.25–46.

Jassem K (2002) Semantic classification of adjectives on the basis of their syntactic features in Polish and English. Machine Translation 17: 19–41.

Jaszczolt KM (2005) Default Semantics: Foundations of a Compositional Theory of Acts of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jaszczolt KM (2016) Meaning in Linguistic Interaction: Semantics, Metasemantics, and Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kamp H (1975) Two theories about adjectives. In: Keenan E (ed) Formal Semantics of Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.123–155.

Kamp H and Partee B (1995) Prototype theory and compositionality. Cognition 2: 129–191.

Kuang C, Yang H and Li Z (2008) The analysis of we-media buzzword ‘I might V counterfeit N’ from the perspective of memetics. Modern Chinese 4: 84–88.

Li H (2006) Linking verb: Home of people’s being in sentence. Foreign Language Research 29: 29–33.

Lepore E and Stone M (2015) Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lu Y (2017) An analysis of the catchword ‘might V fake N’ construction. Sinogram Culture 11: 37–39.

Medin D and Shoben E (1988) Context and structure in conceptual combination. Cognitive Psychology 20: 158–190.

MacFarlane J (2007) Relativism and disagreement. Philosophical Studies 132: 17–31.

Putnam H (1975) Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Partee B (2003) Are there privative adjectives? In: Conference on the Terry Parsons, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 7 and 8 February 2003.

Picazo Jaque C (2019) Are mental representations underdeterminacy-free? Synthese196: 633–654.

Predelli S (2005) Contexts: Meaning, Truth, and the Use of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Qian G (2015) On the infinite-increasing and infinite-decreasing borderline cases in vague references. Foreign Language Teaching and Research 47: 3–8.

Qian G (2001) Non-tool manner language: a study of western philosophy of language. Foreign Languages and Their Teaching 18: 2–6.

Quine WVO (1951). Two dogmas of empiricism. The Philosophical Review 60: 20–43.

Sperber D and Wilson D (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. London: Basil Blackwell.

Verspoor CM (1997) Contextually-dependent Lexical Semantics. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.

Wang Y (2009) Revision on construction coercion: Lexical coercion and inertia coercion. Foreign Languages and Their Teaching 26: 5–9.

Wang Y (2013) The interaction between constructional coercion and lexical coercion with its underlying metonymic mechanism: An analysis of English grammatical and verbal aspects. Foreign Language Teaching and Research 5: 657–668.

Warren BC (1984) Classifying Adjectives. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.

Wittgenstein L (1953) Philosophical Investigation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Wittgenstein L (2001) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge; 2001. [This translation first published in 1961, Revised edition in 1974].

Wu Y (2019) A study of ‘Subject might V fake N’ construction from a triangle in grammar research. Sinogram Culture 5: 39–41.

Xu M (2012) The game mentality and game elements of catchwords: Take the example of irrelevant reference. Contemporary Rhetoric 31: 36–42.

Zipf KG (1949) Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. Cambridge: Addison-Wesley Press.

Downloads

How to Cite

Huang, Q. (2019). A philosophical investigation of catchwords in Chinese. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.18063/fls.v1i1.1088

Issue

Vol. 1 , Iss. 1 (October 2019)

Article Type

Article

License

Copyright © 2019 Qiao Huang

Creative Commons License

This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.