The Study On The Lettered-words In Contemporary Chinese

From 1980's on, there has been another climax of the introduction of foreign words in contemporary Chinese. The main character of this trend is the emergence of the lettered-words. What's more, the number and using frequence of the lettered-words have been increasing in recent years. This phenomenon has attracted many scholars' attention. They conducted many research which emphasized the attitudes towards the lettered-words, the definition, the classification, the origin and formation, and the standardization of the lettered-words and so on. Meanwhile, other scholars also studied the grammatical structures of the lettered-words, its entry into the dictionaries, the automatic recognition and retrieving of lettered-words from large-scale true texts by computers.The lettered-words is defined as the words constituted by letters or constituted by letters mixed with symbols, numbers or Chinese characters. The letters include Latin letters (including pinyin letters), Greek letters, Japanese katakanas and hiraganas. Latin letters occupy a big proportion in all these letters. The majority of the lettered-words are abbreviations of words. Neither the original foreign words nor the letter symbols are lettered-words. Those lettered-words which are accompanied by Chinese characters, read with the sounds of the letters, written in capital letters and formed by the abbreviated letters and those which have strong capability of generality, wide popularity and high frequency of usage in communication are typical lettered-words. The main functions of the lettered-words can be concluded as follows: some of them are economic and have intuitionistic forms; some of them are euphemisms; some of them make use of the pronuciations of the foreign words and easy to remember; they can show the social transformation; they are also helpful for the international communication.This dissertation also examine the lettered-words from different aspects and classify them in terms of form, origin, formation way, semantic type and form of combining with other constituents when used in sentences.The lettered-words have many advantages such as being easy to write, but they also have some problems such as non-standardized pronunciation, mixed use of different forms in expressing the same meaning, one form expressing different meanings and so on. In recent years, the overuse of lettered-words in mass media also have a negative influence on learning and using of Chinese. This in turn causes the confusion in the standardization of Chinese.This dissertation analyses the problems of the lettered-words per se, and points out the negative influences that lettered-words have on the Chinese character system. It also provides many examples and tries to illustrate this problem in depth. Last but not least, this dissertation puts forward some suggestions for the facilitation of promoting standardization of lettered-words.