This paper is about the study of new words of modern Chinese from the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics, choosing a pair of Chinese new words ---“ Phoenix Man(凤凰男)” and “ Peacock Woman（孔雀女）” as the research object, which has been used widely on the network but has not been studied frequently. Here are the definitions of the two words:
Phoenix man: refers to a man who grew up poor and in the countryside, but thanks to their efforts and the support of others, is able to move to a big city and become successful.
Peacock woman is a term for girls who live in cities, have been loved by their parents from the day they were born, and have led lives of luxury.
Phoenix men often hope to marry city girls but often encounter problems resulting from their different cultural backgrounds and habits. Naturally the two words emerged to to reflect the present social and economic conditions of modern China.
This paper focuses on what the word-formation of the two words is and how their meaning is made in the modern society of China. The theoretical foundation of this paper is Cognitive Sociolinguistics, a novel and burgeoning field of research which seeks to foster investigation into the socio-cognitive dimensions of language at a usage-based level, which may be broadly defined as the attempt to achieve a convergence of Cognitive Linguistics and the tradition of sociolinguistics.This paper tries to explore the semantic and pragmatic values and the causes of popularity of “ Phoenix Man(凤凰男)” and“ Peacock Woman（孔雀女）from the internal and the external factors of the language, and find out the motivations of modern Chinese new words from the following three aspects: conceptual integration, metonymic shift and overall constructional construal,with an attempt to provide some implications for the study of the entire vocabulary system of Chinese.
References
Dirk Geeraerts, Gitte Kristiansen & Yves Peirsman. Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010.
Liu, Yumei. CCxG Approach to New Lexical Constructions in Modern Chinese. Beijing: China Social Science Press, 2015.
