On The Semantic Change Of The Internet Buzzword "X-mén" From The Metaphorical Perspective

The suffix "mén" is used to refer to schools or sects in the traditional context, and recently "X-mén" has become a buzzword on the Internet which refers to groups who share common affection. To figure out the reasons for semantic change, this paper adopts a corpus-based method to analyze the linguistic characteristics and high-frequent collocation words of "X-mén". The analysis shows that the old and new meanings of "X-mén" have a lot of similarities in terms of the collocation of words. Using co-occurrences and metaphor theory, this paper explains the mechanism of semantic change about how new meanings are generated from the old ones.