Study On The New Quasi-Affixes In Modern Chinese

Generally Speaking, there are two methods of Chinese word formation, i.e. simplex word by one morpheme and compound word by two or more than two morphemes, including compound, affixation, and reduplicated form. Since the number of Chinese affix is limited, the additional words are used far less widely than the compounds. With the great development of the society, there come a great number of new words in our life, made by roots and quasi-affixes, which are much like affixes but not as feeble or empty as affixes.With the scope of study on the new words issued by "Language Situation in China"(2006-2010), this paper seeks to analyse five quasi-affixes based on the corpus of plane, net and broadcasting media from the following aspects:First, the locations of these quasi-affixes are fixed, either before or after the roots; we haven’t found any evidence of quasi-infix.Second, these quasi-affixes haven’t lost their meanings completely, some keep the meaning from the original, and some get the meaning from the translation.Third, there are certain parts of speech which can be combined with these quasi-affixes, basically noun, verb and adjective, and we can also find some examples of phrases. Most roots are two-syllables, we also have a few three-syllable ones.Finally, the quasi-suffix can determine the part-of-speech of the new compound word, while the quasi-prefix can not as far as we can see.