关键词: 言语社团, 虚拟边界, 信息时代, 概念泛化

Abstract: The concept of speech community originated from Saussures Course in General Linguistics, developed in Bloomfields Language, improved by Labov, Gumperz and Hockett and other linguists. With the rapid development of information technology and the increasingly diverse channels of human communication, the member identity of speech community represents the feature of generalization in spatial and geographical aspects. As a result, the boundary of its concept has been shifting, along with the loss of the original concept boundary and the virtuality of the new concept boundary. The paper firstly recalls the historical evolution of the concept of the speech community, then discussesd the cognitive motivation of the concept of generalization of the speech community from the perspective of Langackers virtual boundary, which aims to enrich the study of the concept of speech community.

Key words: speech community, virtual boundary, information age, concept generalization