Abstract：New concepts arise closely in relation to social factors and new events are often the direct causes that give rise to new concepts. This research presents a case study of the newly-arising concept of the “research tailor” through a designed experiment on offline cognitive judgement tasks. The study attempts to explore the role of linguistic affordance and socio-cognitive affordance in construing new concepts by drawing on the affordance theory in ecological psychology. It investigates how the language system and social cognition interact to provide affordances for new concept construal. The findings indicate that both conventional linguistic and non-conventional environmental factors and their socio-cognitive mechanisms provide the affordances for understanding new concepts. The study further proves that the theory of affordance can offer a new approach to the construal of new concepts.
Key words: new concept construal; affordance; linguistic affordance; socio-cognitive affordance
