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Article published In:
Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 11:2 (2020) ► pp.261–286

Neological cancer metaphors in the Chinese cyberspace

Uses and social meanings

| University of Oregon

This study examines emerging cancer metaphors that are encoded as a neological construction [X-ái ‘cancer’] using corpus data retrieved from Chinese social media. The quantitative findings show that [X- ái] is a highly productive construction where the open slot X attracts a wide variety of lexical items. The qualitative findings are twofold. First, the central meaning of this construction is to express subjective feelings such as self-mockery (e.g., laziness cancer) and contempt for other people’s behaviors in gender discourse (e.g.. straight man cancer). Second, the development of this construction is caused by the exemplar-based cognitive mechanism through social labeling practices. I argue that this neological language use is employed to convey collective emotions in gender discourse and that it indexes a group style, either playful and humorous or contemptuous and disparaging, both of which construct language user identity and sociocultural ideology in the Chinese cyberspace. This study has implications for research on neological metaphors and for language use in digital culture in general.

Keywords: cancer metaphors, neologism, construction, cognitive mechanism, social indexicality, social labeling, social meanings, linguistic humor, Chinese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Neologisms and society
    • 1.2The role of metaphor in neologisms
    • 1.3The goal of this study
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1Corpus data
    • 2.2Analysis of corpus data
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1The productivity of [X- ái]
    • 3.2The constructional meaning of [X-ái]
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1The cognitive mechanism underlying the development of cancer metaphors
    • 4.2Social functions served by cancer metaphors
      • 4.2.1Evoking collective emotions
      • 4.2.2Promoting the dynamic of social labeling in gender discourse
    • 4.3The social indexicality of this neological language use
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 24 November 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.19014.lan
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