A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Neologism

Neologisms refer to the words created to express new things, new concepts and new ideas in written and oral communication. Since the 1980s, the world has entered into an information age. Science and technology has been developing rapidly at an unprecedented speed. The world has witnessed great changes in political, economic, cultural fields. At the same time, China has been carrying out a series of political and economic reforms, which have brought about amazing changes in all social aspects. Therefore, a magnitude of neologisms have appeared both in English and Chinese. These neologisms are a great challenge to those who learn English or Chinese as a foreign language.Both English and Chinese neologisms are created based on their own word elements instead of coming out of the blue. This paper makes a comprehensive analysis and comparison between English and Chinese neologisms with lexicological, semantic and sociolinguistic theories in the hope that it can help foreign language learners get more clear about the formation rules and semantic features of English and Chinese neologisms. It is also aimed to inform foreign language learners of the socio-cultural connotations of English and Chinese neologisms. The neologisms appearing in this paper mainly come from 《英汉大词典补编》 ,《新华新词语词典》 ,《新世纪英语新词语双解词典》, The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, the supplement of new words to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English etc.First,'this paper gives the definition and classification of neologism, and then explores the sources of nelogisms. There are three sources of neologisms both in English and Chinese: creating new words with native word elements, adding new meanings to existing words and borrowing words from other languages.This paper is focused on the analyses of formation features, semantic features and socio-cultural features of English and Chinese neologisms. Based on sueveys of some scholars'and my own, a conclusion is reached that compounding, affixation and shortening are the most active ways to create neologisms both in English and Chinese. Compounding is more important in Chinese than in English, while affixation is obviously more important in English than in Chinese. Shortening plays a similar role in the two languages. My analyses indicate that there are both differences and similarities in the structures of English and Chinese neologisms. The components of English compounds may have morphological changes, which makes the order of the components flexible in a compound, while the components of Chinese compounds have no such changes, which makes the order of the components in a compound in agreement to that in sentences. English affixes are syllable-based while Chinese affixes are character-based. English shortenings are based on the letters and syllables extracted from words and expressions while Chinese shortenings are based on the meaning-loaded characters extracted from words and expressions.The analysis of semantic features of English and Chinese neologisms is made according to their motivation. The overwhelming majority of nelogisms are motivated morphologically or semantically or logically. Their meanings are closely related to the meanings of their combining words or morphemes, which may be the simple combination of the combining words or mophemes, or based on the association with the combining words or mophemes. Transparency, vividness, generalization and specialization, change of grammatical meaning and affective meaning of existing words are shared features which can be found among English and Chinese new words. But the ways and degrees in which these features are displayed in the two languages are not always the same. English is spelling-based while Chinese is meaning-based, which makes Chinese neologisms more transparent than English ones in most cases. English and Chinese both turn to rhetorical devices to express ideas vividly, but comparatively English tends to furnish old words with new figurative meanings while Chinese tends to create v...