Investigate into the Cognitive Motivation of the Derivative Meaning of Words: The Case of Luojuan

Abstract

Taking the “裸捐(Luojuan; nakedly donate)” as an example and insisting on CCMO(Cognition-Combinatory Meaning Outlook, CCMO), this paper has completed the new segmentation and description on the structure of word meaning, and holds that the structure of word meaning constituted by the three elements, that is “referent meaning(RM), attribute meaning(AM) and feature-value meaning(FVM)”, and this paper also hold that the strong expressive power of word meaning dues to the varied possibilities of the combinations among the elements of meaning’s structure. The different assignments and combinations of the elements of meaning’s structure have brought about the new derivations of word meaning. And the psychology of cognitive metaphor plays an important and basic role in the different assignments and combinations of three elements of the meaning’s structure. Taking three elements of the meaning’s structure of “裸捐(Luojuan; nakedly donate)”as an example, its feature-value meanings are different each other, and based on the figurative abstraction and the cognitive metaphor, those different feature-value meanings all have been unified and symbolized as a symbol of “裸(Luo; nakedly)”, which led to the richness and magic beauty of the meaning of “裸捐(Luojuan; nakedly donate)”.