Linguistic Reflection on the Online Catchword of Appreciation —From the Perspective of Usage-based Language Model and Complex Adaptive System Theory

摘要

Language is a special social phenomenon and is always on the changing process with the development of society. During the evolving process of language, new language varieties will continuously emerge due to the changes of some social and cultural factors. Cyber language is universally accepted as one type of the social language varieties. Basically, cyber language can be treated as a complex adaptive system which is influenced by the interaction between users’ cognition, social culture and the surrounding environments. Thus it is safe to say that cyber language is always undergoing a dynamic evolving process. With the usage-based language model as the theoretical foundation, this paper proposes a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) approach to analyze the expression of Appreciation to explore the complex, dynamic and nonlinear development of cyber language from the angle of meaning construction, grammaticalization and functional adaption respectively. It is found that the expression of Appreciation is experiencing adaptively a semantic connotations development and a process of grammatical functions expansion as well. This paper suggests that the emergence and development of cyber language is a novel and trendy social language phenomenon. Network language can achieve its process and evolution under the huge impact of social changes and social promotions. When faced with the changing surroundings, cyber language itself enjoys a timely adaption and responsive development to keep up with the new environments, which reflects the basic principle of language development, namely, language changes with the development of society.