A Study On The Affix Of Chinese New Words

Quasi-affix is different from root and affix with its own characteristics and grammatical functions, but it is defined as a middle state between them. Quasi-affix is a special element of modern Chinese, and there are some questions such as its category, function and nature needed to be researched urgently. So we have to discuss what quasi-affix is and how to discern it by the methods of qualitative and quantitative, on which we also have to make a analysis of its type,constituent, grammatical function and its semantic evolvement and its potentiality of analogy.From the perspective of its form, quasi-affix has various characters such as its diverse sources, fixed location and multiple semantics. And the components of its collocation also present their own traits on materials, the length of syllables, the levels of linguistic. Specifically speaking, there are many kinds of materials such as Chinese Characters, figures, alphabets and their mixed forms; the length of syllables has changed the situation of two-syllable words into three-syllable words as the primary form; the quasi-affix is fixed in the head or the end of a word.When we analyze the grammatical function of quasi-affix, we can find the functions are exhibited in different degrees, for example, the nominal quasi-affix has a high-degree function to make the new words have the same part of speech; the verbal quasi-affix has a middle-degree function; the adjective quasi-affix has a relatively low-degree function. We can classify the functions of quasi-affix to identify the part of speech of words into three types as nouns, verbs and multi-category words. For the colors of new words, the majority can not be identified stably except for only few words, which is attributed to the sources of quasi-affix and its function to make original words abstract.From the perspective of semantic evolvement, metaphor and metonymy play a great role in the process of semantic abstraction, and make it possible for quasi-affix to change its semantic from notional words to function words. We have made a contrast the current quasi-affix semantic with the explanation of corresponding words in Modern Chinese Dictionary(the sixth edition).It can be found that there are three relations between them: the semantic of quasi-affix is the same to the semantic on the dictionary; it is a further abstraction of the semantic on the dictionary;there is no relation between them. According to those different types, we predict the development of quasi-affix briefly. At the same time, we can find that quasi-affixes can make up lexical models, which can help quasi-affix get the power of infinite analogy.