Yuxin Zhao

Internet buzzwords reflect the development of the society and emergence of novel things. Based on the conceptual metaphor theory and with the aid of corpora, this study explores the semantic evolution of one of the “Top 10 buzzwords for 2022”: “烟火气”, published by Excessive Wording. This study classifies the old and new meanings of this word into several categories and finds two types of metaphors among them. This research is anticipated to supply more specific cases to the study of Internet buzzwords from the cognitive linguistics perspective.

Internet buzzword; 烟火气; semantic evolution; conceptual metaphor

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