A Discussion Of English And Chinese Neologisms

Language is constantly evolving. In recent years, under the influence of new science and technology, development of politics and economy, great changes have happened in our society. Language, as the tool of communication and thinking, is sensitive to these changes. As a result, people have to coin new words, in one way or another, to continue our communication and thinking.A neologism is a recently coined word or phrase, or a recently extended meaning of an existing word or phrase. The author mainly selected the new words emerging in the last ten years as the research corpora. Some of them are from dictionaries, such as An English-Chinese Dictionary of neologisms, A Dictionary of New Words from 1949, while quite a lot of others were collected from websites, newspapers and magazines.The paper is composed of six chapters:Chapter one introduces the significance, corpora, and organization of this paper. Chapter two gives a definition to neologism and reviews the previous research. Chapter three and chapter four are the main body of this paper. Chapter three focuses on the word-formation of neologisms and analyses the characteristics of neologisms. Chapter four puts the neologisms into seven groups according to their registers and studies the main factors impacting the emergence and spread of neologisms. Chapter five shows the interactive relationship between neologism and society, and the parallels and divergences between English and Chinese neologisms. Chapter six ends the paper with a conclusion.In present society, English and Chinese have become the most influential languages in the world. Therefore, the author hopes that this study can be of some practical value to students, teachers, translators and interpreters; and of reference value for researchers.