A Comparative Analysis Of English And Chinese

Catchwords refer to those widely and quickly spread words and expressions in acertain period area or group, which from a certain point of view, express people’svalues, ideas and states of mind and reflect social phenomena. So catchwords areclosely linked to our society and which allows us to have a better understanding aboutthe society from another aspect. The research data in this thesis mainly comes fromtwo authoritative research institutions, which published new catchwords every year.One is the global language monitor center; another is the Chinese national languageresource monitoring and research center. This paper gives the definition andclassification of catchwords. It explores the differences between Chinese and Englishcatchwords in forms, semantic features and pragmatic features from the aspects oflexicology, semantics and pragmatics. The purpose is to help language learners have abetter understanding of the differences between Chinese and English catchwords. Atthe same time, it can help us have better understanding of English and Chinese.What’s more, we can understand the laws of language development further.