The purpose of this article is to clarify the trend of generation, settlment, and extinction of new words through conceptualization analysis in terms of the fact that the sequence of processes by which new words are generated, used and extinguished is...
The purpose of this article is to clarify the trend of generation, settlment, and extinction of new words through conceptualization analysis in terms of the fact that the sequence of processes by which new words are generated, used and extinguished is closely related to the conceptualization of language users. To this end, I analyzed the conceptualization of 831 new words and examined their usage.
The results are summarized as follows. First, conceptual metaphors are most commonly identified as conceptualizing mechanisms acting on new words. This means that conceptual metaphors, especially structural metaphors, are useful mechanisms for generating new words. Second, it disappeared at a higher rate in conceptual metonymy than in conceptual metaphors. This appears to be due to the conceptual metaphors characteristics of having a common source domain among language users and the conceptual metaphors characteristics of the relationship between vehicle and target is not inevitable. Third, the change or extinction of metaphorically conceptualized new words has a great influence on society, culture, and the times. The conceptual metaphor is to understand that it is unfamiliar(target domain) through familiar(source domain), so it can extinct if it is no longer used to the language user's environment.
Such an explanation method cannot explain the generation of all new words, and it will not be possible to predict the settlement and extinction of new words. However, such a method is considered to be a reasonable explanation of the tendency of the generation, settlement, and extinction of new words in that elements outside the system can be considered together on a certain basis in the theory of conceptualization. It will also provide the possibility that language can be viewed mainly by the cognitive methods and processes of language users in terms of language being a product of human cognitive processes.