The Semantic Evolution of the Internet Slang “Fang Ge Zi” as “Breaking a Promise”

As the research subject of historical pragmatics continues to expand, this study attempts to explore the semantic change that is occurring these days from the perspective of historical pragmatics. Taking the highly dynamic internet slang term “放鸽子” (literally “release pigeons”, meaning to stand someone up) as an example, aim of this article is to investigate the diachronic evolving mechanism of its semantic shift from its literal meaning to “stand someone up” with the consideration of regional variation and cross-regional interaction, based on a few corpora of different regions. The article is instrumental in proving the applicability of different types of reasoning in the semantic evolution of the same internet slang.