A Contrastive Study On Degree Of Lexicalization Between English And Chinese Neologisms

Lexicalization, as a process of language change, is usually referred to cases in which materials like sentences or phrases develop into or are recruited to form lexical items. Words of different language have different degree of lexicalization. However, it is really hard and need tremendous work to tell that degree of lexicalization of a certain language is higher than that of another. Most scholars conduct their research on comparison of lexicalization between expressions in different semantic fields. This thesis, restricting the research data to English and Chinese neologisms debuted from 1998 to 2007, conducting a through comparison of the new words mainly formed by compounding, affixation, shortening and borrowing and their degrees of lexicalization, attempts to find the difference of degree of lexicalization between English and Chinese neologisms, and also tries to discuss and foresee the tendency of language development from the aspect of lexicon.This thesis integrates qualitative and quantitative research methods. The data are collected mainly from dictionaries such as, New Words Edition of Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary, Longman Contemporary English Dictionary the Third Edition, Xinhua Dictionary of New Words(《新华新词语字典》), Contemporary Chinese Dictionary the 2002 Supplement (《现代汉语词典》2002增补本), as well as some collection books of neologism like Year Book of Chinese Neologisms (《汉语新词新语年编》).The highlight of the thesis not only lies in the latest research data, but also in the combination of Banczerowski's and Parckard's theory concerning degree of lexicalization. Banczerowski believes that a concept or meaning can be expressed either by a phrase or a word, using a phrase to express is analytic expression, while expressing by a word is called synthetic expression. Generally it is considered that synthetic expression is a more lexicalized expression. Packard measures the degree of lexicalization according to the semantic and grammatical relationship between word components and classifies different lexicalization into five categories: conventional lexicalization, metaphorical lexicalization, asemantic lexicalization, agrammatical lexicalization, and complete lexicalization.The result of the study shows that English neologisms is generally lexicalized in a higher degree than Chinese neologisms, which, this study holds, is attributable to the morphological difference between the two languages. English is inflectional language, most new words of which are formed from affixation, while Chinese is isolated morphologically formed, and most new words of which are compounds. Besides morphological reasons, culture can also have influence on degree of lexicalization in a certain language. At last, this thesis discusses that both English and Chinese neologisms tend to bear more tolerance and openness in semantic features, and share brevity and novelty in creation forms.