A Philosophical Investigation of Catchwords in Chinese

Journal Title: Forum for Linguistic Studies - Year 2019, Vol 1, Issue 1

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.

Authors and Affiliations

Qiao Huang

Keywords

Related Articles

Translation from EFL Textbook to Classroom: Pedagogy, Semiosis and Strategy

The modern semiotic world has undergone dramatic changes. Due to the development of technology, a wide range of media and mode are now available to sign makers, facilitating as well as requiring translations within and a...

Using Ethnography in Politeness Studies: A Discursiveness-based Approach

The current study points out the methodological limitations of contemporary discursive politeness research and suggests that in-depth ethnographic data provides a potentially crucial solution. Discursive politeness studi...

A Philosophical Investigation of Catchwords in Chinese

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 lan...

Marked Causative Structures of Chinese Verb-Resultative Construction

This paper aims to study the syntactic and semantic features of ‘marked VRC causative structures’, those special syntactic-semantic structures formed by verb-resultative constructions (VRCs) which violate both the Unifor...

Intonational Pitch Features of Interrogatives and Declaratives in Chengdu Dialect

As a representative of southwestern Mandarin, the Chengdu dialect has its own distinctive pitch features in phonology of tone and intonation. Research on the pronunciation and lexical tone of the Chengdu dialect has a lo...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP679291
  • DOI -
  • Views 256
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Qiao Huang (2019). A Philosophical Investigation of Catchwords in Chinese. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 1(1), -. https://www.europub.co.uk/articles/-A-679291